Holding HTTP open for 590 seconds so a Stream Deck key can approve a tool call
·2355 words·12 mins
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. (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.)