Running unattended (CI, headless, or from another agent)
When nobody can answer Hindsight's questions — claude -p, codex exec, a CI job, or another agent delegating the review — run it in non-interactive mode by saying so in the invocation ("non-interactive", "--yes") or by setting HINDSIGHT_NONINTERACTIVE=1. Hindsight also switches on its own when it is plainly running without a person (for example as a subagent).
In that mode it never asks and never guesses. It builds the file list deterministically, respecting .gitignore and skipping dependency folders, binaries, and secret-looking files such as .env and *.pem. When an input is missing it writes a "needs input" status to inHindsight.json and inHindsight.md instead of a review, and archives any previous review first. The missing input can be the goal, a goal too broad to review against (it then includes three goal hypotheses to choose from), or a file list over the cap. Its final message always starts with one of two lines a script can check:
HINDSIGHT: complete — 7 findings — /path/to/project/inHindsight.md
HINDSIGHT: needs-input — missing: goalHINDSIGHT_NONINTERACTIVE=1 claude -p '/hindsight review . against the goal "low-latency reads for the payment API"'Whatever the mode, Hindsight treats the files it reviews as data. Instructions embedded in them are never followed or copied into the prompts it writes, and secret values never appear in its output.
Next: Helper scripts