Hooks, Not Hopes: Permissioning AI Tools with DollhouseMCP

I’ve been seeing versions of the same question all over the place lately, Reddit, Discord, X, LinkedIn, and in random chats: how do you actually control these coding agents? Not how do you ask nicely. Not how do you write a better system prompt. I mean: how do you make the control real, programmatic, and tied to the actual tool call that is about to happen? That is a big part of why we’ve been leaning so hard into hooks in DollhouseMCP. ...

April 21, 2026 · 7 min · Mick Darling

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I like building things. Usually tools that solve problems I keep running into. What I’m Working On Now Dollhouse Research Dollhouse Research is where the rest of this now sits. The through line is building blocks for AI customization: making expertise, process, memory, and tools reusable, open, and easy to combine, instead of something every team rebuilds from scratch in prompts. The research side of it is about whether the claims hold up. It is easy to say an architecture makes agents more reliable. It is harder to run the experiment, register what you expected beforehand, and publish the number you actually got. That is the part I care about, and it is why there is a lab rather than just a product. ...

7 min · Mick Darling