Hooks on Nick Liu - Software Engineer

Your First Claude Code Hook: Auto-Name Every Session

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Part 1 we learned that named sessions are easy to find. Now let's make naming automatic with a hook. This is also a perfect first hook project, so I'll explain the whole idea from scratch.

🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux

Part 1 left us with one chore: you still have to remember to name your sessions. Let’s delete that chore.

Holding HTTP open for 590 seconds so a Stream Deck key can approve a tool call

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Claude Code wants to run a shell command. I want to press a physical Stream Deck key, the YES key two inches to the left of my keyboard, to approve it. The hook gets exactly one HTTP response to decide allow vs deny. The key press might land in 200 milliseconds; it might land seven minutes later, after I've been pulled into a meeting and come back. The trick is that Claude Code's hook timeout is 600 seconds, which turns out to be just enough headroom to hold the HTTP response open the whole time and let a hardware button write the answer.

🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS

(Setup, for anyone who hasn’t seen this stack before: Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal CLI for Claude, and one of its hook events, PreToolUse, is a script Claude spawns and waits on before running a tool like Bash or Edit. The script’s stdout decides “allow” / “deny” / “ask”. Stream Deck is Elgato’s USB grid of programmable LCD keys. The plumbing I’m describing here lives in a daemon, a background process at 127.0.0.1:9127, that the hook script POSTs to and that the Stream Deck plugin connects to over WebSocket. For the hooks docs themselves and the four other gotchas in that layer, see the hooks-reality post.)

The Claude Code hooks docs are wrong. Here's what's actually on the wire.

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a daemon to listen to Claude Code hooks. My first version read `$CLAUDE_HOOK_PAYLOAD` and logged empty bodies for two days straight. The payload was sitting on stdin the whole time.

🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS

This post is the five gotchas I hit while wiring up ClaudeDeck, a Stream Deck plugin (a small program that runs inside Elgato’s Stream Deck app on the USB grid of programmable LCD keys) that talks to Claude Code over its hooks system. Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal CLI for Claude (claude in your shell), and its hooks are user-defined scripts it spawns at certain points in a session (before a tool call, on session start, on prompt submit). My daemon is a long-running background process the plugin and the hooks both talk to over a local socket. None of the gotchas are exotic. All of them cost me hours. Each one is a place where the docs were either silent, ambiguous, or contradicted by tribal knowledge I picked up from other people’s projects.