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Agentic Workflows — Field Guide

A field guide to using GitHub Workflows and Agentic Workflows

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release


Scenarios

Profile

Dimension Recommendation
on.roles: N/A — creating/publishing releases requires write+ access.
Activity types [published] is the most common and safest — fires when a release is published (including from draft). released fires when a release is moved out of pre-release. Add prereleased for pre-release validation workflows. Avoid edited unless you’ve designed for re-execution — editing an old release’s notes fires today with today’s secrets.
Concurrency $-$. cancel-in-progress depends on whether you want multiple rapid edits to a release to stack or replace.
Idempotency Required. Releases can be deleted and re-created, or edited after publication — downstream automation must be safe to repeat.
Fork posture Apply if: $ to prevent running within a user’s fork. Releases are upstream-only but forked repos can create their own.
Approval gate Not subject to the “Approve and run workflows” button.
Copilot events Releases created via GITHUB_TOKEN do not trigger. Releases via GitHub App tokens or PATs do.
Sanitize payload? Release name and body are maintainer-controlled and generally trusted (write access required). Acceptable to handle unsanitized payload within the agent job (sandboxed), coupled with proper safe-outputs.
Safe-outputs create-issue, add-comment, create-discussion, create-pull-request for post-release automation. workflow_dispatch via gh workflow run if triggering downstream workflows.
Integrity filtering approved (default) for outputs that require triage+ permissions. unapproved or none when scanning community issues to close resolved items — must pair with tight safe-outputs. See standard guidance.

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