Keyboard shortcuts

Press or to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

safe-chains

Agentic coding tools prompt you dozens of times per session for commands like

  • git log --oneline | head -20
  • cargo test && cargo clippy -- -D warnings
  • or even find src -name "*.rs" -exec grep -l "TODO" {} \; | sort | while read f; do echo "=== $f ==="; grep -n "TODO" "$f"; done.

You approve them all, and eventually stop reading the prompts, which is exactly when a destructive command slips through.

safe-chains parses these commands (pipes, chains, loops, subshells, nested wrappers) and approves only when every segment is verifiably safe. Now, you only get prompted to approve a command when something interesting comes along.

safe-chains covers 1568 commands with flag-level validation, compound command parsing, and recursive subshell expansion, all deterministically, not based on a model’s guess like with Claude’s auto mode.

How it works

With your agent harness configured to run safe-chains from a hook, each Bash command is analyzed and gets a decision response.

Or, just run safe-chains yourself in your terminal to learn about a command. It’s fun!

safe-chains "ls -la | head -5"    # exit 0 = safe
safe-chains "rm -rf /"            # exit 1 = unsafe

Getting started