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Coding agents run shell commands on their own. Most are harmless: builds, tests, git status. A few delete things that have no copy, or push code somewhere. This page builds a guard that decides, before each command runs, whether a person should look first, and then finds out how often that guard is right. The data is 38 commands that real coding agents ran in public sessions, each with the request it served. The guard asks three yes/no questions about each. Would it destroy something? Would it change anything outside the project? Would it send anything out? You need uv and a TypeSafe API key. Everything below costs about $0.002.
1

Install

2

Copy the example

Open command_guard.yml. It holds the three questions, a confidence bar, an accuracy test and two cases that must always pass. Its first line points your editor at hunch’s schema, so VS Code and Cursor (with the YAML extension) complete keys and flag mistakes as you type. Only destroys has an answer key, the gold_destroys column.
3

See the cost before paying it

compile sends nothing. Above that last line it prints the exact request for the first command, which is everything the model will see.
4

Run it

act: 0.90 in the spec is the bar for acting without a person. For 11 commands the answer to destroys was less confident than that, so a person would decide those.Run the same command again. This time it reports 114 cached, 0 asked and $0.00000. Each answer was stored under its exact input, and that input has not changed.
5

Measure it

The guard gets 37 of 38 right. The dial answers the practical question: if it acted alone above a confidence, how many commands would it settle, and how many of those would be wrong? At 0.9 it settles 27 of the 38 with no mistakes and leaves 11 to a person.The one mistake is worth a look. Command 26 is rm -rf ~/.local/share/pipx/venvs/fdroidserver, deleting a broken Python environment. The answer key says that destroys nothing; the model says it does. Which is right is a judgment call, and the review step is where you make it.reaches_outside and sends_out print nothing: without gold there is nothing to measure against.
6

Change a question, and see what it changes

Put the folder in git, so there is a version to compare against:
Now narrow sends_out to things other people can see, in command_guard.yml:
command_guard.yml
The run asks 38 questions, not 114: only sends_out changed. The diff then compares the two versions from the store, so it costs nothing:
Four commands stopped counting as sending something out, and the mean shift shows the new wording lowered p(yes) across the board. Read the flips before you ship a change like this. Command 20 is gh workflow run android-release.yml --ref main, which starts a release build on GitHub. The narrower question no longer stops it, and only you can say whether it should.
7

Review

Review shows one command at a time and asks for the right answer. Rows where the model and the answer key disagree come first, so command 26 is up, and your verdict settles it. Then come random spot checks, where Enter agrees with the marked answer. Verdicts go to command_guard.reviews.csv, and the next hunch test counts them as gold.

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With a coding agent

If Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will work on your specs, hunch skill installs a skill that teaches it the same steps, with a cost cap on every run and your review verdicts left to you.

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Where to go next

Concepts

The ideas behind what you just ran.

Guard a coding agent's commands

The same guard on all 1,315 commands, with its miss rate.