Policy references

A reference !policy-id; adds to the compiled prompt what Claude needs to respect a CPO policy. It never creates, installs, enables or changes a policy, and CPO keeps enforcing its policies whether a program mentions them or not: a reference only saves Claude a refusal.

FROM @packages {
  !ts-no-any;
  !file-size;
  ADD "The PQL lexer";
}

Resolution

The id is looked up with CPO's own discovery, in the project where Claude Code runs (a FROM never changes it), highest priority first: .claude/policies/, .claude/policies/profile/, ~/.ccpp/policies/, ~/.ccpp/policies/profile/. The definition CPO selects is the one used; an overridden one is never a fallback. A policy from a renamed profile keeps its prefixed id. Press ! in the prompt box to list the active ones.

What Claude receives

A Markdown block, never PQL: the policy text is quoted and never parsed again.

The compiler reads installed files only. It runs no check, effect or module, and proves nothing about compliance: CEL conditions and modules are marked as evaluated by CPO.

Visibility

A reference never reveals what CPO keeps from Claude. A policy with a deny effect, or with internal effects only (log, notify, set…), has nothing to expose: the reference is the error PQL-X005, shown to you only, and its message names nothing.

Perimeter and duplicates

A policy that provably cannot reach the program's scopes (every event is a file event and its paths, exclude or scope exclude the perimeter) gives the warning PQL-X006 and no context. Shell and session events can run anywhere, so they keep it. A second reference to the same policy in the block or an enclosing block is merged (PQL-X008). A LIMIT FILE above the limit of a refusing max-lines or max-bytes policy is PQL-X009.

Diagnostics

References sit in a block's preamble and never inside HOW { } (PQL-P003).