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Weekly Update – October 12, 2026

Oct 12, 2026

Copilot

Five releases shipped in github/gh-aw this week, from v0.91.4 to v0.91.8. The themes: smarter model routing, new engine options, and sturdier sandboxes.

Release Highlights

v0.91.8

Agent sessions now render as full elapsed-time timelines, with consistent trace normalization across Copilot, Codex, Claude, Gemini, Pi, Kiro, Aider and AGY.

• Built-in graders: a new code-read-precision trajectory grader and builtin grader defaults loaded from setup-action JSON.
• Model routing: Copilot wire APIs are selected from AWF metadata and model mismatches are surfaced. The firewall moved to v0.28.51.
• Hardening: a custom grader sandbox escape was closed, and workflow YAML, scanner file handling and temp-file writes were tightened.
• Memory validation: declarative JSON schema validation for memory, with repairable invalid repo-memory baselines.

v0.91.7

This release introduces a native Go Agy engine (#66998) and deprecates the Gemini engine in its favor (#66941), so plan to migrate Gemini workflows.

• Work queue upgrades: priority-aware conformance dispatch (#67222) and scoped GitHub Issues mirrors (#67025).
• Better model visibility: routed model and effort are reported across outputs (#66963), plus per-agent spend (#66961).
• Secret detection now covers all AWF environment sources (#67017).

v0.91.6

• Git-backed fair DAG work queues with claim-scoped effects (#66024).
• Model routing across Claude, Codex, and pi (#66723).
• Stricter pull_request_target checkouts via an explicit strict-mode policy (#66649).

v0.91.5

• Ordered engine model fallback keeps workflows running when a preferred model is unavailable (#66593).
• auto and copilot/auto models now work in Pi, Codex, and Claude (#66567).
• New gh aw fix codemods for Copilot web-fetch and reserved inputs (#66556).

v0.91.4

v0.91.4 adds support for Claude Code with GitHub Copilot inference and local-first workflow debugging.

Agent of the Week: unbloat-docs

Documentation Unbloat reviews the docs and simplifies verbose pages while keeping them clear and complete.

This week it ran every night on its schedule at about 01:15 UTC. All three runs we looked at (October 10, 11 and 12) succeeded, taking between 7 and 10 minutes and producing one safe output each.

Its stated mission is to make docs shorter, so it spends its nights trimming words, which is a bit like a barber who works only while you sleep.

Usage tip: Pair a scheduled editor like this with a /unbloat slash command so you can also trim a specific page on demand.

→ View the workflow on GitHub

Try It Out

Upgrade to v0.91.8 and see the full release list. Feedback and contributions are welcome in github/gh-aw.

Weekly Update – October 5, 2026

Oct 5, 2026

Copilot

Three releases shipped in github/gh-aw this week, headlined by work queues and built-in ledgers in v0.90.3. Here’s what’s new.

Release Highlights

v0.90.3

This release introduces work queues and ledgers, tightens safe-output guardrails, and broadens Copilot model support.

• Work queue & ledgers: built-in log, set, map, table, and counter ledgers, plus Git-backed work-queue operator commands. See the ledger compaction docs. Related PRs: #65494 adds selectable issue-backed queue storage, and #65443 dispatches queued work to trusted worker workflows.
• Copilot engine: AWF task-level model routing, none and max reasoning efforts, GPT-6.1 Sol support, Claude 5.5 and GPT-6 pricing, and a run-wide tool-call budget for Copilot SDK agents.
• Safe outputs: add-labels supports separate call and per-call label limits, and several hardening fixes landed. #65612 adds attributed issue creation for custom safe-output jobs.
• Docs: a redesigned site with a new landing page, warm palette, and Mona Sans.

Heads-up on behavior changes: GitHub App tokens now require explicit scopes at compile time, Claude defaults to strict MCP configuration, and add-comment fails when the triggering target can’t be resolved.

v0.90.1

Standalone safe-output-backed ledgers arrived (#64354), along with richer audit artifacts covering ledger transactions and threat-detection outcomes (#64509, #64506), and compile-time self-hosted runner enforcement (#64173).

v0.90.0

Step summaries now render friction cost, agents may emit two noop calls by default (#64031), and five new trajectory graders were added.

Other Notable Pull Requests

• #65423 adds a TLA+ workflow security model and fail-closed credential cleanup.
• #65564 emits incomplete outcomes with diagnostics when an agent produces no safe outputs.
• #65650 makes PR Sous Chef poll faster and start agents only for actionable work.

Agent of the Week: daily-arxiv-researcher

A daily scout that reads the latest arXiv papers and looks for ideas that could improve GitHub Agentic Workflows.

Its recent runs have all succeeded in about five to six minutes. The October 2 and 3 runs used the Copilot CLI engine, and the October 4 run was the first on the Codex engine with web search and fetch tools, after a recent change moved it there. That run used roughly 84K tokens, versus 7K and 13K for the earlier runs.

The new engine is evidently more curious: it read about six times as many tokens as its predecessor on the same morning schedule.

Usage tip: Pair a research workflow with a dedup cache, as this one does with cache-memory, so it never reports the same paper twice.

→ View the workflow on GitHub

Try It Out

Update to v0.90.3 and give work queues a spin. Feedback and contributions are welcome in github/gh-aw.

Agent of the Day – September 28, 2026

Sep 28, 2026

Copilot

Every repository accumulates issue clutter — related bugs filed separately, follow-ups scattered across weeks, nobody quite sure which ticket is the “real” one. Today’s Agent of the Day is the workflow built to fight that entropy: Issue Arborist, a daily codex-powered agent that reads the last 100 open issues in github/gh-aw and cultivates order out of them.

Agent of the Day: Issue Arborist

Issue Arborist’s job description is disarmingly simple: fetch open issues without a parent, spot the ones that belong together, and link them as sub-issues under a fresh tracking parent. No opinions about priority, no code changes — just topology. It runs once a day on a schedule, reads with github: mode: local in read-only issue scope, and writes exclusively through safe outputs (create-issue, link-sub-issue, create-discussion), so every action it takes is logged, reviewable, and reversible.

Its most recent run on September 28 is a good showcase of both the value and the honesty built into these agents. Working from 63.2k tokens and 11.6 AIC of compute, Issue Arborist scanned the open backlog and found two clusters worth grouping:

• #63931 – “AW workflow failure and incomplete-result incident tracking”, a parent stitching together 33 recurring incident issues from daily workflow runs — everything from failed follow-ups to no-safe-output cases — into one place a maintainer can actually triage instead of scrolling past one-off tickets.
• #63932 – “Deep-report quick-win remediation backlog tracking”, grouping 12 smaller quick-win fixes flagged by the deep-report workflow into a single actionable backlog.

It also opened discussion #63933 in the audits category to summarize the pass, following the same reporting convention every gh-aw daily agent uses so a human skimming discussions gets the same story without opening 45 issues.

Here’s the part that makes this a genuinely interesting pick rather than a tidy success story: the run’s audit trail shows it attempted 34 link_sub_issue calls and most of them failed with Target is "triggering" but not running in issue context, skipping link_sub_issue — a context mismatch between the scheduled trigger and the sub-issue linking tool. The workflow’s own audit report flags this plainly as a workflow_failed critical finding, not something smoothed over. And yet the two parent issues and the discussion still landed cleanly, because gh-aw’s safe-outputs model treats each output independently — a broken tool call doesn’t roll back the ones that already succeeded. Compare that to the previous day’s run, which completed with no findings and no issues to group, a perfectly quiet, uneventful pass.

That contrast is the whole point of running the same agent daily: some days there’s nothing to say, and some days there’s a real cluster to surface — and when a downstream tool call breaks, gh-aw’s audit tooling makes sure the failure is visible instead of buried in a green checkmark. Issue Arborist doesn’t pretend the run was flawless. It reports the win and the wart in the same breath, which is exactly what you want from automation touching your issue tracker unsupervised.

Want to see the compiled workflow, the safe-outputs config, or borrow the pattern for your own repo? Start here: github/gh-aw.

Weekly Update – September 28, 2026

Sep 28, 2026

Copilot

It was a big week for github/gh-aw: three releases shipped, a legacy sandbox runtime was retired, and the firewall got noticeably stricter about what agents can reach. Here’s the rundown.

Release: v0.89.22

v0.89.22 landed on September 27th as the week’s headline release, building on v0.89.21 and v0.89.20 from earlier in the week.

! Breaking Change

• Docker sbx and gVisor sandbox runtimes removed (#63034) — isolated agent execution now runs exclusively on Cloud Hypervisor. If your workflow frontmatter still sets sandbox.agent.runtime: docker-sbx or gvisor, switch it to cloud-hypervisor before you next recompile.

What’s New

• Hosted-web domain policies in frontmatter (#63212) — the new network.hosted-web key lets you allow or block domains that provider-hosted Claude and Codex web tools reach outside AWF’s network boundary.
• Firewall enforcement got sharper — Copilot and web tools now get enforced firewall compatibility checks (#63474), scoped precisely to the web tools a workflow actually enables (#63632), while false blocked-domain warnings for otherwise-successful requests were squashed (#63246).
• Grouped audit findings mode (#63032) — gh aw audit --group now aggregates findings by run and code with occurrence counts, in pretty, markdown, or JSON output.
• More audit visibility — an opt-out for automatic audit baseline downloads (#63012) and MCP payload size reporting in audit (#63687) give workflow authors finer control over what audit runs measure and fetch.
• Large Copilot prompts streamed through stdin (#62766, thanks @davidslater!) — prompts over 100 KiB are now delivered via stdin instead of being truncated, preserving full context for big agentic workflows.
• Repo-memory backend for daily AIC guardrail (#62958) — memory persistence now supports repository-backed storage for cost accounting.

Notable Fixes

• Fixed dangling safe-outputs-app-token references when safe outputs are staged (#63490).
• Fixed repo memory retry head refresh authentication (#63497) and prevented cache-memory validation marker EACCES failures (#63498).