Auto mode is for people who just keep hitting "YES" on everything, it's a bit better than that.
But it's real easy to give auto mode instructions (like "always ask before deploy") and then bypass that just normally.
Until the model updates or you switch between them often that stops obeying your commands and you have to remind it.
In one of the occasions it opened a bug report for me just waiting for hit the enter button.
I'm not sure I agree.
It's easy to "give" instructions, but Claude routinely "forgets" to follow certain instructions, such as "always using the Edit Tool".
Just this week it started to use bash with string concatenation to work around some commands that were blocked in settings.json