Govern Claude Code before it surprises you

The problem

Claude Code is fast. Most of the time that is exactly what I want. Some of the time it is not. In the past few months it has rm -rf'd a node_modules I actually needed for a different checkout, force-pushed to main after a rebase I had not finished reviewing, and installed a package I had not vetted because an upstream snippet suggested it.

None of these are the agent's fault. The agent did what I told it to do, and sometimes what I told it to do was too broad. The question is not "how do I make the agent smarter" — the question is "how do I keep a small number of specific actions from running without me knowing."

Demo

Here is the three-minute walkthrough. Hook install, first destructive call intercepted, phone tap, terminal unblocks. Real Claude Code session, real Discord DM, real stopwatch.

Everything below is the writeup of what you just watched.

How it works

DashClaw registers a PreToolUse hook on your Claude Code install. Every Bash, Edit, Write, MultiEdit, and mcp__* call goes through a policy check before it runs. Three steps:

1. npm install && npm run hooks:install wires the hook into ~/.claude/settings.json.
2. Paste a workspace token from /connect. That is the API key my deployment uses to recognize this laptop.
3. Configure Discord — pick a server, pick a channel, drop in a bot token. I use my own account; you use yours.

Three commands and one paste. The Claude Code → DashClaw → Discord → phone loop is the only thing on the critical path.

What's free

The runtime is free forever for solo devs on the Claude Code path. That includes:

• · The PreToolUse hook and the claude-code-starter policy pack.
• · Discord and Telegram approval bridges.
• · The /decisions ledger with signed approvals and denials.
• · The semantic guard, using your own OpenAI or Anthropic key — so the governance loop costs me about a cent per approval.
• · The /activity and /my-agent surfaces, where I check what the agent did today without scrolling through a terminal.

I self-host on Vercel free tier. Postgres on Neon free tier. Zero SaaS subscription. Deploy button on the GitHub repo.

What broke and what I fixed

Two things bit me early and both shipped fixes you will never see directly:

• CSP blocked the embed. The first time I put a Loom iframe on the homepage, Chrome refused to render it because my frame-src directive was self. Fixed by explicitly allowlisting loom.com and youtube-nocookie.com in next.config.js, and by having the embed component itself throw if someone tries a third host.
• The hook silently failed open when the guard was unreachable. If my deployment was down, a destructive action would just… run. Fixed with a block / warn / allow policy knob that defaults to block, plus an orphan-actions journal that backfills every outage call into the ledger on recovery.

Both of these are the kinds of things you only find by running DashClaw on your own laptop every day.

What's next

I'm building the rest of DashClaw's growth loop under DashClaw-governed agents. Research, content drafts, monitoring — each one is a Claude Code session with policies the public can read. If the flywheel works, every piece of marketing I publish also proves the product. If it breaks, the audit ledger shows exactly where.

Public status page coming. The first one will be a live board of how many Claude Code integrations are active this week, which policies fired most, and which denials I had to override because my own policy was wrong.

Try it

npm install
npm run hooks:install
# then open /connect for the workspace token + Discord setup

Three commands. The guide walks you through the rest: /guides/claude-code.

If something breaks, open an issue on GitHub. I read all of them.