GitHub Agentic Workflows

I’m excited to share our latest research demonstrator from GitHub Next – “GitHub Agentic Workflows – Natural Language Programming for GitHub Actions” .

https://githubnext.com/projects/agentic-workflows/

Agentic Workflows focuses on expressing repository‑level behaviors in natural language and running them on GitHub. Agentic Workflows is not a product and not even a technical preview; it’s a vehicle for exploring the agentic design space, and learning what works (and what doesn’t) in day‑to‑day repositories.

Agentic Workflows are a demonstrator for a form of natural language programming over GitHub. Instead of writing bespoke scripts that operate over GitHub using the GitHub API, you describe the desired behavior in plain language. This is converted into an executable GitHub Actions workflow that runs on GitHub using an agentic “engine” such as Claude Code or Open AI Codex. It’s a GitHub Action, but the “source code” is natural language in a markdown file.

Critically, agentic workflows are compiled to existing GitHub Actions workflows (YAML). In this research demonstrator, you use the gh aw GitHub CLI extension to perform a short, simple, manual compile step to generate the Actions workflow. In the future, we envisage that it may be possible to simply commit a markdown file to .github/workflows, and agentic things “start happening.” Just like YAML files on GitHub Actions today.

The design of Agentic Workflows takes an “Actions-first” approach to the agentic design space. This means the design aligns with familiar concepts from GitHub Actions: repo‑centric execution, team‑visible logs, permissions, partial sandboxing of execution, secrets, environments, triggers, security controls, and job semantics stay as with GitHub Actions. Because Agentic Workflows build on top of GitHub Actions rather than around it, the organization can audit the workflows, version them, and reuse established tools and patterns. Agentic Workflows provide a clearer, more declarative way to express what some users are already doing on GitHub Actions today.

Read more on our project page, and explore our repos!

* Check out the examples at https://github.com/githubnext/agentics/
* Explore our implementation at https://github.com/githubnext/gh-aw/

Thanks to Eddie Aftandilian, Jonathan “Peli” de Halleux, Krzysztof Cieslak, Russell Horton, Idan Gazit, Mara Kiefer, Ben De St Paer-Gotch, Kate Catlin, Jiaxiao Zhou, Luke Hoban, Mario Rodriguez, Daniel Meppiel, Skylar Anderson, David O’Regan, Greg Fisher, Chuck Lantz and many others at GitHub for all the great conversations, and also to all the amazing people working on Claude Code, Codex and the underlying models.