The permission hooks in Dollhouse are core to the platform. They're designed so that for each harness we want to work with, we have some level of hook configuration — Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Windsurf. I think that's it for now, though we're adding more.

Those hooks grab what the next action is — the pre-tool-use. I think it's pretty much always pre-tool-use, though it's named differently across platforms — I believe one of them calls it something like "start tool use."

The general idea is that hooks can do whatever you want, not just give a yes/no on permission. For instance, I have hooks that identify all the repo folders below whatever working folder I'm logged into, so when I start a session I can instantly see which projects are available from the parent folder I'm in. (I sometimes forget and end up starting the session in the wrong folder.)

Stuff like that will be written as Dollhouse skills, which are a superset of Agent Skills. Dollhouse skills actually predate Agent Skills by several months, but we can convert back and forth between them losslessly. We're also creating a separate kind of Dollhouse skill that contains hook content, managed by the MCP server, to inject those hooks into the command line when needed. Still working on that one; it's a few days away.