What are GitHub Agentic Workflows? Section titled “What are GitHub Agentic Workflows?”
Imagine a world where improvements to your repositories are delivered automatically each morning. Issues are automatically triaged, CI failures analyzed, documentation maintained, test coverage improved and compliance monitored - all defined via simple markdown files.
GitHub Agentic Workflows deliver this: automated repository agents, running in GitHub Actions, with security-first design principles.
Workflows run with read-only permissions by default. Write operations require explicit approval through sanitized safe outputs (pre-approved GitHub operations), with sandboxed execution, tool allowlisting, and network isolation ensuring AI agents operate within controlled boundaries.
Example: Daily Issues Report Section titled “Example: Daily Issues Report”
How they work:
Write - Create a .md file with your automation instructions in natural language Compile - Run gh aw compile to transform it into a secure GitHub Actions workflow ( .lock.yml ) Run - GitHub Actions executes your workflow automatically based on your triggers
Here’s a simple workflow that runs daily to create an upbeat status report:
--- on : schedule : daily permissions : contents : read issues : read pull-requests : read safe-outputs : create-issue : title-prefix : " [team-status] " labels : [ report , daily-status ] close-older-issues : true --- ## Daily Issues Report Create an upbeat daily status report for the team as a GitHub issue.
The gh aw cli converts this into a GitHub Actions Workflow (.yml) that runs an AI agent (Copilot, Claude, Codex, …) in a containerized environment on a schedule or manually.
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