Fwiw i used to do this (and with lints) - it was the only way to make Claude consistent in the early days when i first started using it (~August 2025).

For many months now though, Claude is nearly consistent with both calling test and check/clippy. Perhaps this is due to my global memory file, not sure to be honest.

What i do know, is that i never use those hooks, i have them disabled atm. Why? Because the benefit is almost nonexistent as i mentioned, and the cost is at times, quite high. It means i cannot work on a project piecemeal, aka "only focus on this file, it will not compile and that's okay", and instead forces claude to make complete edits which may be harder to review. Worst of all, i have seen it get into a loop and be unable to exit. Eg a test fails and claude says "that failure is not due to my changes" or w/e, and it just does that.. forever, on loop. Burns 100% of the daily tokens pretty quick if unmonitored.

Fwiw i've not looked to see if there's an alternate way to write hooks. It might be worth having the hook only suggest, rather than forcing claude. Alternatively, maybe i could spawn a subagent to review if stopping claude makes sense.. hmm.

I find this doesn't work automatically for me because the projects I'm on have a lot of conditional compilation feature flags that it doesn't quite understand how to cargo check properly, unless I tell it.

Maybe for your case you could create a /maybe-check command, and run that in the hook? Then specify the conditions under which a check/test is needed in there.