Feedback: YOLO mode is more practical than "Ask When Needed" for long-running agentic sessions

[Cheng-JW]

Summary

After using both permission modes extensively in daily research-computing work (SLURM cluster, long agentic sessions with many sub-agent dispatches), I find YOLO mode significantly more usable than "Ask When Needed"(new yolo) mode, to the point that I downgraded from 0.40.1 back to 0.39.1 to keep my preferred workflow. I would like to share the reasoning and suggest improvements.

Why YOLO works better in practice

1. Predictable autonomy: In YOLO I know exactly what happens — regular tool calls proceed without interruption, and I stay focused on reviewing outcomes instead of approving individual calls. In "Ask When Needed" mode the interruption points are less predictable, which breaks flow during long multi-step tasks.
2. Sub-agent heavy workflows: My setup delegates most implementation work to sub-agents (via Agent/AgentSwarm). Approval prompts multiplied across parallel sub-agent runs make "Ask When Needed" considerably noisier than YOLO.
3. Session continuity: I often leave sessions running (tmux + cron-triggered checks). YOLO lets these complete unattended; approval-gated modes stall on prompts nobody is there to answer.

Suggestions

• Keep both modes first-class: please don't deprecate or gate YOLO behind extra friction in future releases.
• Consider making "Ask When Needed" interruption criteria more transparent/configurable (e.g. an allowlist-first behavior where approved-once tool+pattern combos stop prompting — this already partially exists, but its scope could be broader and more visible in the UI).
• A per-session summary of what would have been asked in YOLO mode (a dry-run approval log) would give the best of both worlds: full autonomy with an audit trail.

Environment

• kimi-code 0.40.1 (linux-x64, install-script installation)
• Use case: computational materials research on an HPC cluster; long-running sessions with heavy sub-agent delegation

[7Sageer]

If your main pain point is unattended sessions, you might want to try never-ask mode.

[ywang96]

Shouldn't yolo be default to never-ask? Semantically yolo means "You only live once" which seems better fitted to never-ask than ask-when-needed.

The co-existence of auto and yolo seems a bit confusing from the user's perspective - if the intention is to have yolo be a safer option than auto, perhaps it is better to just rename this flag and safely deprecate the old name.

[Cheng-JW]

If your main pain point is unattended sessions, you might want to try never-ask mode.

But still there might be some options needed to be decided by users. never-ask seems too brutal-force. But the ask-when-needed mode now raises more questions like whether to run a script or a command, which is not the case of the old yolo mode. Frankly-speaking, correct me if I'm wrong, this ask-when-needed thing seems like the old ask mode in daily uses.