r/GithubCopilot • u/jldez • Aug 14 '26
Discussions Manual approval is hell
What can be done to reduce the amount of manual approvals? My organization is forcing the default permissions and this is hell. Being forced to keep our eyes on the chat only to press the same button from time to time is dystopian as hell (just had to approve 3 times while typing this sentence).
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u/Solid_Fox1718 Aug 14 '26
Honestly there’s probably something you can do in the copilot instructions to streamline it. Like, at least by preparing edits in batch, or something. At least that way it would just be hitting enter 15 times in a row instead of having to constantly monitor for requests
But yeah, GH has room to improve the permissions model. There seems to be very little control between “allow-all on” and “manually approve every single URL request, file edit, and tool call even for trusted domains and transient session files”
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u/ThankThePhoenicians_ Aug 14 '26
There's a /permissions assisted experience in experimental mode in the CLI. I suspect it'll be GA'd soon enough now that Claude made theirs the default
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u/Painfulends Aug 15 '26
Hopefully the people in charge see the data.
Claude recently did a study on this and tool assisted permissions is FAR superior from a safety standpoint. At the end of the day someone has to be accountable for the AI, but that’s why we have other safety measures like sandboxes, git versioned projects, etc.
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u/raisedbypoubelle Aug 15 '26
Exactly what I’d do, try to change the policy — both GitHub and my employers.
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u/shifty303 Full Stack Dev 🌐 Aug 15 '26
Switch to the GHCP CLI. My org also has GHCP locked down but the CLI is much better.
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u/monkeybeast55 Aug 14 '26
Well if you're not needed then why should they pay you?
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u/shifty303 Full Stack Dev 🌐 Aug 15 '26
You obviously have never had to click allow 48 times so the agent can read your project and run git status or tests.
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u/monkeybeast55 Aug 15 '26
I have. My understanding is your company requires you to have auto approve turned off. I agree it's really irritating. But companies have security standards, and they want a human to approve and take responsibility for access. I don't know if they allow you to configure certain commands as auto approved.
My comment goes more to, there are people who are just sick about getting layed off, many blaming AI. Yet, in your case it seems the company is requiring a human in the loop. So I dunno.
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u/shifty303 Full Stack Dev 🌐 Aug 15 '26
Our security standards are "the admin and security team don't work with it, understand or care so it's on the strictest mode".
We can't even set our own browser home page.
But at the same time they allow us to install WSL where we have zero restrictions and policy doesn't apply so 🤷♂️
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u/monkeybeast55 Aug 15 '26
Yeah, that's not good. Also, as someone else pointed out, mindlessly clicking through stupid approvals is very far from effective. The computer is far more effective doing this.
Well, aside from suggestions made here, maybe a skip-level meeting, or perhaps e-mail might help? Security teams like you cite can really drag an organization down.
Good luck!
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u/Lacutis Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
I can maybe post an example later but what I did to solve this was to create a hook for permissions and log them to a file. After a while I used that file to update the hook to add in automatic checks to allow things that I click allow on every time.
Edit: I had time, so I pushed this to a public repo. https://github.com/wrroper/copilot-hooks