Move machine-specific Claude settings out of the shared config

[Yornik]

Context

This addresses the #docs thread about whether .claude/ belongs in .gitignore.

Both positions in that thread are right, because they are about different files. Skills are not in settings.json. They are seven standalone tracked files, and they keep shipping to everyone who clones the repo no matter what happens here:

.claude/skills/docs-{add,alt-text,enhance,polish,pr-review,proofread,review}/SKILL.md
.claude/hooks/{validate-bash-command,audit-log}.sh
.claude/rules/{aws,security}.md
.claude/scripts/resolve-doc-url.sh
.claude/statusline.sh
CLAUDE.md

So gitignoring .claude/ is not the answer — that would unshare the skills, which is exactly what we want to keep. Only one part of settings.json causes the problem, and this PR moves just that part.

What breaks today

The env block pinned values that are specific to one machine:

Key	Problem
AWS_PROFILE: my-sandbox	Anyone whose profile has a different name gets credential failures
CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK: 1	Forces Bedrock on contributors not using it
ANTHROPIC_MODEL + 4 more model IDs	Pinned to claude-sonnet-4-6 / claude-opus-4-8; goes stale every release
MAX_THINKING_TOKENS: 1024	Throttles reasoning for every contributor
CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS: 10240	Caps output for every contributor
OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER: otlp	No effect, since telemetry is disabled two lines above

The last two are the least visible and probably the most damaging: they quietly degrade the agent for everyone.

What changed

• Moved those keys to a new .claude/settings.local.json.example. Copy it to .claude/settings.local.json, which is already gitignored and takes precedence over the shared file. Nothing is lost — the Bedrock setup is still one cp away.
• Kept the telemetry opt-out in the shared file, since it is machine-neutral.
• Nested the permission rules under permissions. They were top-level allow and deny keys. The documented schema is "permissions": { "allow": [...], "deny": [...] } and no top-level form exists, so the deny list was almost certainly inert — meaning the sudo, kubectl apply, terraform apply, and rm -rf / guards were not actually blocking anything, while .claude/rules/security.md states that guardrails are mandatory. Worth confirming with /permissions after merge.

All 81 deny and 69 allow entries are byte-identical, verified programmatically; only the nesting changed. Hooks and status line are untouched. Both files parse as valid JSON.

Note for reviewers

check-claude-settings.yml fails any PR touching .claude/** unless the author is on its tech-writer allowlist, so this PR will go red and post the standard warning comment. That gate is working as intended — this change does need TW sign-off, which is why it is a separate PR from the docs work rather than bundled in.

The permissions nesting fix is arguably the more urgent half. Happy to split it into its own PR if you would rather land that first and discuss the env question separately.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code