Claude Code desperately needs a read-only mode [Product Request]
A user on a developer community forum has requested a "read-only" mode for Claude Code, citing frustration with the AI's tendency to modify code during analysis. Currently, Claude Code offers "auto", "manual", "accept edits", and "plan" modes. The proposed fifth mode would allow the AI to analyze files and offer opinions without making any changes, addressing a common annoyance for professional software engineers.
This request highlights a user-identified gap in Claude Code's current four operational modes, proposing a fifth "read-only" option unlike the existing ones that allow modifications.
Time & source
Times shown in UTC
Display time zone: UTC
Local time zone unavailable; showing UTC.
PublishedOffset at this time: UTC+0Sep 29, 2026, 02:54 UTC
IngestedOffset at this time: UTC+0Sep 29, 2026, 09:00 UTC
- Published
- Sep 29, 2026, 02:54
- Ingested
- Sep 29, 2026, 09:00
- Source type
- Dev community
- Tier
- Community
- Source status
- Sync delayed
Tier is a per-source editorial setting, not a per-item score.
Discussion trend
The percentage is based on collected discussion signal, not new comments or independent people. The curve only compares the same topic across time.
There are 4 modes available on Claude Code: auto, manual, accept edits, plan. There should be a fifth one called read-only. In this mode, the AI can go ahead and do all kinds of analysis of what is happening and come up with some opinions on how to move forward without changing anything. It can read all the files but it specifically does not write or edit anything.
This allows us to just have a discussion. Plan mode works better for making a full plan for a specific task when we have a direction we want to go in. Manual mode is incredibly tedious and can do nothing on it's own.
As a professional software engineer, nothing frustrates me more when I tell Claude to do analysis and it just goes ahead and starts messing up the code without me having any understand is going on. Frickin so annoying.