TL;DR: What’s This GO AI Blog Post About?
Whether you are brand-new to vibe coding or are a seasoned vibe coder, you may not be familiar at all with the practice of adding “hooks” while in vibe coding sessions.
Hooks exist to implement commands and processes that run every time in a vibe-coding workflow. The point is to ensure that the coding agent runs a certain command during its lifecycle. The alternative is relying on the coding agent to make the choice to run a command, which it may not do if it decides against it. A hook decides for the agent.
Hooks are a common feature in agentic coding tools. Major coding tools like OpenAI’s Codex offer hooks. Hooks are also recommended by Anthropic for users of Claude Code.
Five Key Takeaways from This GO AI Blog Post
- Hooks are configured differently across different agentic-coding tools so make sure you know how to configure a hook script correctly for whatever AI tool you are using.
- If you are unsure what hooks to add for your vibe-coding project, ask the AI itself what it would add. It may recommend several hooks.
- Hooks can be good for security. Whether it is to prevent Claude Code from deleting certain data (or, conversely, making sure Claude Code deletes certain data) or ensuring Codex is logging the executions in a run, hooks help businesses stay secure.
- “Notifications” is an event name that you can create hooks around. So, notifications can act as like a category of hooks. You can set up hooks so that the AI can notify you whenever it is about to execute a command or if it needs your approval. Setting up AI notification hooks can be great for implementing human-in-the-loop processes.
- There is a wide variety of hooks to create and choose from, so familiarizing yourself with the different kinds of hooks can be useful.
Why This Matters for Business Owners: AI Hooks for Better Agentic Coding
The more you use Claude Code or Codex or another tool, the more you want the AI to follow precise step-by-steps whenever you use it.
Without hooks, you can leave a lot of things to chance. You might just be relying on AI to figure out for itself when you want it to use a certain tool during a workflow.
Relevant here is the risk of context rot, where the AI agent’s reliance on project context becomes problematic.
Sometimes context rot can occur because of exceeding the context window.
Other times context rot can occur because the user is overrelying on AI to “just figure it out”.
Coding with AI Hooks: How AI Hooks Work
There are a variety of events that can occur in the lifecycle of a coding tool’s run.
The way to use hooks is to create a hook that runs when one of these events occurs.
PreToolUse is an event occurring before a tool call. So if you want AI to not use a certain tool during a certain coding project, create a hook blocking that specific tool’s use. When the agent’s lifecycle reaches a PreToolUse event, the agent will look under that event to find whether there are any hooks that should run when that event occurs.
You can run multiple hooks when a given event occurs.
However, you may not want hooks to run at every instance of an event’s occurrence. That is why matchers exist. Hooks without matchers will run every time an event occurs. A matcher specifies when a hook should or should not run if a given event occurs.
For instance, perhaps you want Notifications to run only when your AI agent needs a specific response from you, instead of just whenever it completes a task. A matcher will specify when notifications should be sent.
If you are wondering where to start with hooks, try browsing Plugins in Claude Code to find plugins for certain agentic workflows in Claude Code. These plugins typically have hooks.
AI Hook Example: Protecting File Types from Modification
Some file types in projects should be protected from modification or deletion.
Creating a hook for the PreToolUse event will ensure that tools used will not edit file types of your choice. That may include .env files.
Ask your coding agent of choice to create a file blocker to protect certain file types from being modified or deleted by the AI.
Signing Off: Start Experimenting with AI Hooks
Coding agents like Claude Code sessions do not come with pre-set hooks or matchers for those hooks. Going beyond the desktop app into the terminal for AI agents for code reviews and writing code and run tests. When a session starts, you can set hook events so that an agent works as you want it to work.
So, it is up to users to implement the hooks themselves. Luckily, users can collaborate with the AI to create hooks and matchers to make workflows more effective as well as more secure.
Overall, the point of using code hooks is to make sure that AI coding agents like in Claude Code runs do what you want the agents to do every time.
