The permission wall — why the job sweep starvedCapability

In a headless session there is no one to click Approve — any tool not pre-allowlisted in settings.json silently auto-denies. That single fact is why the Aug 3 job sweep did nothing.

Interactive Claude Code asks permission per tool and you click through. Headless (`claude -p`, what every cron job uses) can't ask — so the permission system falls back to settings.json: allowlisted tools run, everything else auto-denies. A job that needs WebSearch in a session where WebSearch was never allowlisted isn't 'slow' — it's structurally impossible.

The failure was well-behaved, which is the system working: the sweep deliberately wrote nothing (an empty findings file would poison the next diff by reading as 'ran, found nothing'), and the wrapper's verify leg caught the failure and fired the deduped 🚨 task. Fail-loud, no corruption. But two Sundays of zero sweeps means the fix itself is now the task.

Related discovery: six deny rules in your settings.json use Glob(/Users/tom/Documents/**) syntax — and the permission engine warns, in every single headless log, that Glob() rules don't match file reads; they need to be Read() rules. Those warnings have been scrolling past for weeks. Malformed deny rules are worse than noise: the directories you meant to protect aren't protected.

Worked example

See both problems in one minute:

# The starvation, in the sweep's own words:
tail -40 /Users/tom/Claude/JobHunt/logs/sweep.err

# The malformed deny rules (printed at the top of every headless run):
grep -m6 'Permission deny rule' /Users/tom/Claude/PDB/logs/plan-day.log

• The sweep log ends with a [BLOCKED] verdict and names the exact fix: pre-allowlist WebSearch/WebFetch, or run /job-sweep interactively.
• Each warning line tells you the exact rewrite: Glob(/Users/tom/Documents/**) → Read(/Users/tom/Documents/**). Read() rules cover all file-reading tools; Glob() rules cover only the Glob tool itself.

Gotchas

• Allowlisting WebSearch for headless runs allowlists it for EVERY headless run on this machine, not just job-sweep. That's the real decision on tonight's card — scope, not syntax.
• Don't allowlist broad Bash(*) to make a job work — that hands every cron job arbitrary shell. Allowlist the narrowest tool that unblocks the job.