Claude Code just stripped out its dedicated file search tools, and the move has blown a hole in its permission system. Starting with version 2.1.117, the AI coding assistant no longer uses separate Grep (text search) and Glob (filename matching) tools. Now, all file operations run through the Bash shell.
That's a problem. Bash is a general-purpose command line tool. It can do a lot more than just search—it can delete files, modify them, install software, and execute other high-risk operations. Anthropic engineer Adam Wolff said the change makes things faster, noting it "took four months to remove these tools; subtraction is much harder than addition."
https://twitter.com/sqs/status/2047129764520169947
Amp Code CEO Quinn Slack pointed out that this breaks the existing permission logic. Before, users could set permissions by tool type: read-only tools like Grep and Glob were automatically approved, while Bash commands required manual, line-by-line approval. Now that everything goes through Bash, that tiered approval system is useless. Users are stuck with two bad options: manually approve every single shell command (which is wildly inefficient) or just allow everything (which removes security controls entirely).
Slack argues this exposes a more fundamental issue: using deterministic rules to manage AI agent permissions doesn't work. The model will find equivalent ways to bypass classifications—like using bash(grep query | head -n 10) instead of a dedicated search tool, or inline calls to sed, perl, or python to execute arbitrary operations. He said the Amp team tried automatically parsing Bash commands to judge safety, which "roughly cut the approval volume in half, but what's left is still too much." This comes as Anthropic is making other significant changes to Claude Code, like quietly testing locking it behind its $100 Max plan.