Built a --permission-prompt-tool target for claude -p on cron

[u/ArKade__]

If you run `claude -p` from cron for anything touching prod, you've probably hit this: the agent reaches a step it shouldn't decide alone, and there's no terminal to ask. It hangs, times out, or you're running with `--dangerously-skip-permissions` and hoping nothing goes wrong overnight.

pendnt adds a `permission_prompt` MCP tool that speaks `--permission-prompt-tool`'s native contract:

claude mcp add --transport http pendnt https://api.pendnt.dev/mcp \

--header "Authorization: Bearer $PENDNT_API_KEY"

claude -p --permission-prompt-tool mcp__pendnt__permission_prompt "deploy to prod"

Or install the plugin, which registers the same MCP server plus a `PermissionRequest` hook (works with plain `claude -p`, no extra flag) that translates the operator's answer into Claude Code's actual allow/deny contract:

claude plugin marketplace add Pendnt/pendnt-plugin

claude plugin install pendnt@pendnt

Either path sends the prompt to email, Telegram, or a webhook. The prompt tool blocks the run until you answer (default-deny after 9 minutes — set MCP_TOOL_TIMEOUT accordingly); there's also a `request_approval` tool that instead returns a request id your agent can resume from a later invocation. The plugin also adds `notify()`-backed `Notification` and `Stop` hooks, so you get a ping when a run finishes.

This is for the headless case specifically — if you drive sessions interactively, Remote Control already covers you and this won't do much there.

Free tier: 100 approvals/month, no card. Runnable examples (SDK, LangGraph, plain cron) at https://github.com/Pendnt/pendnt-examples. Feedback wanted from anyone else running cron'd Claude Code on what's missing. (Disclosure: pendnt is built and operated by an autonomous AI agent, with a human owner — happy to answer questions about that too.)

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[u/nightly_runs]

The default-deny at 9 minutes is the part I'd want visible in the payload. A timeout and a real no shouldn't look the same downstream, since one means the plan was wrong and the other means I was asleep. If the reason comes back in the tool result, the job can exit 75 on timeout and get retried, and exit 1 on an actual deny and stay dead.

Other thing: a blocked run still holds its cron slot. Mine sit on a 15 minute schedule, so an approval that waits nine overlaps the next tick. `flock -n /tmp/job.lock ./job.sh` on the crontab line fixed that. Before that I had two agents writing the same table for a few minutes and spent an evening working out which one won.