Positron Assistant configuration

A committed settings file saying what the assistant may do in a project

Index of the documents in the positron-assistant-config project: a working specification recommending the settings file for Posit Assistant in Positron, and the sources it draws on.

Obsolete, 2026-09-12. The approval mode is set from the chat pane, not from a settings file. Click the icon at the lower left of the chat input box and pick Auto mode. The work below was done before that control was found, and is kept for the permission key reference it contains. The project is on the archive page rather than the Projects page.

Posit Assistant asks for confirmation on every file it edits. Turning that off wholesale gives an assistant that will also push to a shared branch and send a data frame to a model provider. The setting that sits between the two is approvalMode, and the file it belongs in is .posit/assistant/settings.json in the project root, committed so that everyone working in the repository gets the same posture.

The recommended file is two settings long. The specification says what those two settings do, explains how the permission system decides anything at all, compares the auto and normal modes, and carries a checklist of twenty-one behaviors with a verdict on each.

No behavior in it has been observed in Positron yet.

Documents

• Working specification. The recommended settings file, how the permission system works, auto against normal, the checklist of behaviors, and the sandbox.
• References. The Posit documentation, the general cross-vendor guidance on agent permissions, and a marker on each recording whether the claim drawn from it has been checked against the source.