Glossary Permission mode
Permission mode
AgenticAI
Definition
The harness setting that decides which of an agent's actions run unasked, which prompt a person, and which are refused outright
A denied call is a person declining, not an error to retry. The modes trade speed for oversight: the more that runs unasked, the more the guardrails in the repository have to carry.
Here the outward-facing and hard-to-reverse actions — pushing, merging, spending, sending — stay with the person regardless of mode; the tests and the pre-commit hooks are what make the rest safe to run unasked. The Dictionary of AI Coding has a longer treatment.