Home | GitHub Agentic Workflows: An Interactive Book

How to read this book

Every chapter follows one running example — the Repo Assistant — from a single workflow to an organization-wide fleet. The 14 chapters are grouped into three parts that scale up in scope. Two tracks run through the book; follow the call-outs that match your role.

Part I

The Individual (one workflow)

01 What Are Agentic Workflows? Explain what an agentic workflow is, why the outer loop matters, and when to reach for gh-aw instead of plain GitHub Actions.

02 The 10-Minute Win: Your First Workflow Install the gh aw CLI and ship a first working Repo Assistant that triages a new issue end to end.

03 Anatomy & the Compile Model Read any workflow's frontmatter + Markdown, run the compile-and-iterate loop, and understand what the generated .lock.yml contains.

04 Triggers: When Workflows Wake Up Choose the right on: events so the Repo Assistant runs at exactly the right moments and no others.

05 Engines: Choosing the Agent's Brain Select and configure an engine (Copilot, Claude, Codex, or Gemini) and understand the portability that engine-neutral design buys you.

Part II

The Team (safe, reviewed, patterned)

06 Safe Outputs: Acting Without Overreach Let the Repo Assistant write to the repo — issues, comments, PRs — through the sanitized safe-outputs boundary instead of raw permissions.

07 Defense in Depth: Permissions, Firewall & Strict Mode Harden a workflow with least-privilege permissions, an egress firewall, and strict mode so a compromised prompt can do little damage.

08 Tools & MCP: Real Capabilities, Governed Give the Repo Assistant real capabilities with the tools: block and MCP servers while keeping every capability governed.

09 Continuous Triage & Docs: Reading the Room Ship two production-shaped patterns — Continuous Triage and Continuous Docs — as mini-products the Repo Assistant runs on its own.

10 Continuous Review, Testing & CI-Doctor Close the quality loop with Review, Testing, CI-Doctor, and Refactoring patterns while keeping humans on the merge decision.

Part III

The Organization (fleet at scale)

11 Reuse & Memory: Shared Components and Repo Knowledge Factor common intent into imported shared components and give the Repo Assistant memory that persists across runs.

12 Trust & Operate: Observability and Debugging Inspect, debug, and audit runs with gh aw logs, gh aw audit, and OpenTelemetry so you can trust what the fleet does.

13 Governance & FinOps: Policy and Cost at Scale Cap, meter, and gate agentic spend with AI Credits and max-ai-credits, and set org policy so the fleet stays affordable and compliant.

14 Fleets & Adoption: From One Repo to the Org Scale the Repo Assistant into a governed multi-repo fleet and follow an enterprise adoption playbook to roll it out.

How to read this book

Chapters by part