Tale Mode is a discipline plugin for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex — it makes any Claude work like a careful senior engineer (verify the real code, source every decision, run an independent review before "done"), and ships a self-armed autonomous loop that keeps going until a real check passes.
Highlights since v2.3.0
Plan-mode read-only auto-approve (the 2.5.0 headline, #14). Tale-mode's plan/kickoff ceremonies live in plan mode, where every shell command raises a permission dialog — turning careful investigation into a wall of prompts. A new fail-closed PreToolUse hook auto-approves a Bash call only when it can prove the whole command read-only; everything else silently falls through to the normal dialog, so it can never block or approve anything you wouldn't have. The classifier is default-deny and adversarial: it rejects $/backticks/backslashes/process-substitution/heredocs outright, rejects every output redirect except a token-boundary >/dev/null, catches quote-obfuscated flags by matching on dequoted tokens, and positively guards every whitelisted binary that has a write/exec flag (find/sort/git/sed/jq/…). Review-hardened: git config approves named-key reads only — the dump forms can spill credential-bearing config into model context. Kill switch: TALE_PLAN_APPROVE=0. The honest residual-risk write-up is in SECURITY.md; the 118-check test suite is deliberately fail-case-heavy, because a guard that can't fail isn't a guard.
Context-economy discipline (2.4.0). The skill now treats the context window as a budget: fan bulk work out via Workflow/subagents, demand terse conclusions back instead of raw dumps, and batch round-trips — so long sessions stop drowning in their own transcript.
Governor v2.0.0 — zero idle cost (#13). The optional Layer-2 governor now costs nothing while things go well: exactly one read-only model escalation per stuck goal, on both hosts. Install separately: /plugin install tale-mode-governor@tale-mode.
The map. New ARCHITECTURE.md documenting the three-layer model (discipline skill → deterministic loop → advisory governor), loop mechanics, and the trust model.
Install
/plugin marketplace add alicicek/tale-mode
/plugin install tale-mode@tale-mode # core (free)
/plugin install tale-mode-governor@tale-mode # optional governor
Requires Claude Code ≥ v2.1.154 (kickoff auto-arm verified on ≥ v2.1.195). See the README for the full tour and SECURITY.md for the threat model.
Verification
Every hook path is covered by a deterministic gate — bash tests/verify-cross-platform.sh runs the six unit suites (164 / 29 / 10 / 65 / 118 checks + 36 for the governor), claude plugin validate, and Codex parse/engagement checks. The plugin is dogfooded: changes to it are built with its own method and reviewed by the plan-reviewer agent it ships.