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If a repository command’s safety check reaches its deadline, treat the result as unverified—not as proof the command is safe. A local-first coding agent should block the command unless its hook can actually pause for a human decision; unattended agents should be configured to deny unverified outcomes.
What a command-safety timeout means
A timeout means the evaluator did not finish deciding whether a command is safe before its allotted time expired. It does not mean the command passed. The Destructive Command Guard (dcg) project documentation states: “It never treats elapsed analysis time or an oversized extracted command as proof that execution is safe.” When dcg’s absolute evaluation deadline expires, it returns an indeterminate result: a hook that supports operator review can request a decision, while a hook without that capability blocks.
This is a safety policy, not an industry-wide timeout standard. The documented ordinary end-to-end hook evaluation timeout is 1000 ms. The careful_company_running_windows preset defaults to 3000 ms. These are dcg configuration defaults, not performance measurements or universal recommendations.
Choose the result your agent can actually enforce
Interactive sessions with a real review channel
If the hook protocol can deliver a decision request to a human who can respond, review is a meaningful option. The request should reflect that the evaluator did not reach a verdict; it should not be presented as an approval or a safety pass.
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Unattended sessions
For sessions without a human available to answer, configure unverified outcomes to deny. In dcg, set general.unverified_decision = "deny" or use the environment variable DCG_UNVERIFIED_DECISION=deny. The documented examples include deadlines that expire and extracted commands that exceed the configured size limit. A setting that nominally asks for review is not a safe substitute if no review channel can deliver and receive that decision.
Set and tune dcg’s evaluation deadline
dcg’s general.hook_timeout_ms setting or the DCG_HOOK_TIMEOUT_MS environment variable overrides the preset or ordinary default. Explicit values below 10 ms are clamped to the documented safety minimum. The deadline is end-to-end and uses monotonic wall-clock time: it continues to advance while the process is descheduled or waiting on a bounded operation. The project explains that a CPU-time budget would not provide the same hook-latency bound because it can stop advancing during those waits.
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Under a heavily loaded host, dcg advises increasing hook_timeout_ms and using dcg test --enforce-budget to exercise the evaluator-side budget outside a live hook. Treat that as dcg-specific tuning guidance, not evidence that a particular timeout is correct for every machine or agent.
Keep timeout policy separate from other failures
Not every failure means evaluation started and ran out of time. dcg documents distinct handling for unreadable hook input, transient I/O problems, and failures while extracting or parsing embedded commands. Applying one blanket “fail closed” rule to all of them would misstate the documented behavior.
| Failure case | Documented dcg handling |
|---|---|
| Evaluation deadline expires | Returns an indeterminate result; requests review where supported, otherwise blocks. Unattended sessions can be configured to deny. |
Extracted command exceeds max_command_bytes |
Does not treat the size limit as proof of safety; produces an indeterminate result that can be denied for unattended sessions. |
| Malformed or oversized raw hook JSON | Allowed with an audit warning by default; denied when general.fail_closed = true. |
| Transient hook stdin I/O error | Remains fail-open in the documented policy, including when considering the separate malformed-input setting. |
| Heredoc or inline-script extraction/parsing failure | Uses a bounded fallback scanner. Configuration can disable fallback on parse error or timeout to block. |
These distinctions matter operationally: an indeterminate safety verdict is not the same event as an input that could not be read or parsed. Configure and test each path according to whether your hook can safely continue, request review, or must deny.
Apply the policy to a repository hook
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Set the end-to-end budget through
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For an unattended agent, set
general.unverified_decision = "deny"orDCG_UNVERIFIED_DECISION=denyso an expired evaluation cannot authorize execution.Do these 3 things before closing this tab:
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If malformed or oversized top-level hook JSON must also be denied, set
general.fail_closed = true. This setting does not change the documented fail-open behavior for transient stdin I/O errors.Best Value
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Choose heredoc and inline-script fallback behavior deliberately; configure blocking on parse error or timeout if continuing with the fallback scanner is not acceptable for your workflow.
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On a heavily loaded host, raise the deadline as needed and run
dcg test --enforce-budgetto exercise the evaluator-side budget outside a live hook.
What this policy does—and does not—establish
The documented settings describe dcg’s behavior; they do not establish how other repository hooks handle deadlines, whether a particular command is safe, or a general timeout threshold for local-first agents. There is also no verified statistic here for timeout rates or path delays. The practical rule is narrower: when evaluation has not finished, preserve that uncertainty in the result and choose review only if a real review path exists.
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