anti-laziness-guard

Anti-Laziness Guard

Stop hook that detects and blocks work-skipping rationalizations at stop time. Fires automatically on every Stop event when the workflow-toolkit plugin is enabled.

How It Works

Three hooks run in parallel every time the agent tries to stop. Any one blocking prevents the stop.

Layer 1: Command Hook (always runs, <1s)

Deterministic regex matching against the agent's last_assistant_message. Detects Tier 1-2 laziness phrases with >75% confidence.

Blocks on phrases like:

• "skip the remaining review stages"
• "in the interest of time"
• "context constraints" / "running low on context"
• "accelerate through the remaining"
• "consolidate the remaining"
• "not worth the complexity"
• "to save time" / "for brevity"

See references/phrase-taxonomy.md for the complete taxonomy with sources.

Layer 2: Prompt Hook (always runs, ~2-3s)

Haiku evaluates the agent's final message for intent-level patterns that regex cannot catch:

1. Premature victory — declaring success while work remains incomplete
2. Offering instead of doing — "Let me know if you'd like me to..." for assigned work
3. Silent omission — summarizing completed work without mentioning skipped items
4. Rationalized shortcuts — framing incomplete work as "a good start" or "sufficient"

Layer 3: Agent Hook (conditional, 10-30s)

Evidence-based deep verification that reads task lists and plan files. Only activates when the flag file exists:

touch .claude/anti-laziness-deep-check

When active, a subagent with Read/Grep/Glob access:

1. Checks ~/.claude/tasks/ and .claude/tasks/ for incomplete tasks
2. Reads plan files in .claude/plans/ and cross-references against the agent's claims
3. Searches the transcript for TodoWrite entries with pending/in_progress status
4. Blocks if it finds incomplete work that the agent didn't acknowledge

Remove the flag file to deactivate: rm .claude/anti-laziness-deep-check

Infinite Loop Prevention

The command hook checks stop_hook_active — if the agent was already blocked by a stop hook and is trying to stop again, it is allowed through. This prevents the hook from blocking indefinitely.

Configuration

Enable/disable the entire hook: Enable or disable the workflow-toolkit plugin in Claude Code settings.

Enable deep verification (Layer 3):

# Before a critical session
touch .claude/anti-laziness-deep-check

# After the session
rm .claude/anti-laziness-deep-check

Disable just the command hook: Not possible without modifying hooks.json. If you experience false positives, please report them so we can refine the phrase taxonomy.

Tier Summary

Tier	Confidence	Action	Detection Method
1	>90%	BLOCK	Regex (command hook)
2	75-90%	BLOCK	Regex with context scoping (command hook)
3	50-75%	Documented only	Not enforced — see references/phrase-taxonomy.md
4	Varies	BLOCK	Haiku evaluation (prompt hook) + optional agent verification

Background

This hook was designed based on research across 10+ verified GitHub issues (anthropics/claude-code #26691, #21604, #23368, #16506, #1632, #24129, #6159, #8738, #20270, #1113), the Columbia DAPLab "Vibe Coding Needs Policy Enforcement" research, the Cognition/Anthropic "context anxiety" discovery, and analysis of real session logs showing agents using euphemistic language ("accelerate," "consolidate," "streamline") to disguise work-skipping as productivity optimization.