I’m not a Claude code user, is there really no way to get it to not commit to git other than “asking it nicely in a prompt”? I thought there was some sort of permission system?
I could ban it from using git, but having access to git logs helps it do work so I don't want to go that far. I could probably ban the subcommand, but as a convenience I do like to be able to ask it to make a commit. (I'm not super attached to this, I frequently commit myself just to avoid these issues). It does tend to write good commit messages, so sometimes I ask it to generate the commit message and then just do the operation myself, which kind of sucks in the sense of feeling like reverse-centaur (Cory Doctorow term). (The reason I do that is sometimes it gets confused where if I greenlit one commit, it assumes all future commits are greenlit)
I guess the other option would be to not use "auto" mode, but god there's just no way I want to sit around and it "yes" 50x a session. I'd rather just sandbox it and nuke it if it does something too stupid.
This way the agent can read git logs (this is very useful) but cannot commit directly (I don't see any value in this).
The automatic coauthor line is also just a pet peeve. It’s a tool, not a person. I don’t say that a commit was coauthored by vim - why should Claude get special treatment?
re: automatic coauthoring -- you can turn that off, but I prefer to turn that on. Commit ownership is something that I want to make clear was not just a human, but a human + AI. Agentic coding does get special treatment from me, because the volition to make changes doesn't come from me. I want that to be clear in the history. The only time I do my own commits (without the coauthor line) is when I make some change myself, without a coding agent.
Bash(“git * commit *”)
And for bonus points you can have the agent write you a Pre Bash hook. Tell it to make the hook look in the command for anything that’s a git commit. The vaguer your instructions here the better. Let it pull some crazy regex out of its hat. You’ll be impressed.
I want to be clear that I'm not saying this to discredit the people saying they can't get claude to stop making its own commits, I'm just adding data to the "wow this is inconsistent" collection.