🔍 Agentic Workflow Audit Report - October 11, 2025

[github-actions[bot]]

🔍 Agentic Workflow Audit Report - October 11, 2025

Audit Summary

• Period: Last 24 hours (2025-10-10 00:30 UTC → 2025-10-11 00:30 UTC)
• Audit Status: ✅ Completed (Limited Data Collection)
• Data Sources: Previous audit reports, PR activity analysis, issue tracking
• Limitation: ⚠️ gh-aw MCP server unavailable - unable to analyze individual workflow run logs

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📊 Progress Since Last Audit

✅ Fixes Implemented (5 PRs Merged)

Significant progress was made addressing issues from the October 10th audit:

PR #	Title	Impact	Status
#1501	Fix error pattern false positives	✅ Fixed false positive error detection	Merged
#1500	Add --toolsets all to workflows	✅ Improved toolset configuration	Merged
#1496	Fix genaiscript GitHub token auth	✅ Fixed 403 authentication errors	Merged
#1495	Add explicit permissions to CI	✅ Security fix - proper permission scoping	Merged
#1494	Add MCP debug tracing to simonw-llm	✅ Enhanced MCP debugging capabilities	Merged

Success Rate: 5 fixes merged in 24 hours demonstrates responsive issue resolution! 🎉

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🚨 Critical Issues Status

1. MCP Server Initialization Failure ⚠️

Status: 🔴 UNRESOLVED (Persists from Oct 10 audit)
Severity: CRITICAL
Affected Workflow: Agentic Workflow Audit Agent (this workflow)

Description: The gh-aw MCP server fails to launch during audit workflow runs, preventing access to workflow logs and run data.

Impact:

• Audit system cannot access detailed workflow logs
• 100% of audit runs affected by this limitation
• Forced to rely on GitHub API and PR analysis instead of direct log analysis
• Previous audit showed 2 failures in 24h due to this issue

Recommendation:

• Priority 1: Fix MCP server initialization in audit workflow environment
• The gh-aw binary appears to be built but not running as HTTP server during audit execution
• Consider alternative: Store workflow summaries in structured artifacts during execution

Workaround Active: Using GitHub API + PR analysis + previous audit data for current audit

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2. Scout Workflow Health 🔴 CRITICAL

Status: 🔴 UNRESOLVED
Severity: CRITICAL
Last Known Success Rate: 3.5% (3 of 85 runs succeeded)

Description: Scout workflow has a catastrophically low success rate, indicating a systemic issue.

Impact:

• Scout is nearly non-functional with 96.5% failure rate
• High activity workflow (85 runs in previous 24h period)
• Wasting significant CI resources

Recommendation:

• Priority 1: Deep investigation required to identify root cause
• Consider temporarily disabling Scout until root cause identified
• Analyze failed run logs to identify common failure patterns

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⚠️ High Priority Issues

1. Missing Agent Logs

Status: 🔴 UNRESOLVED
Frequency: 22% of analyzed failures (4 of 18)
Affected Workflows: Multiple (Audit Agent, Changeset Generator, etc.)

Description: Agent completes successfully but /tmp/gh-aw/agent-stdio.log file is not created, preventing error validation and debugging.

Recommendation: Investigate why agent stdio log file is not consistently created

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2. Branch Deletion Race Condition

Status: 🔴 UNRESOLVED
Frequency: 33% of Changeset Generator failures (3 of 9)
Affected Workflow: Changeset Generator

Description: Changeset Generator attempts to push to PR branches that were already deleted after merge.

Recent Failures (from Oct 10 audit):

• copilot/create-artifacts-discussion
• copilot/refactor-safe-outputs-env-tests
• copilot/add-audit-command-cli

Recommendation: Add branch existence validation before push-to-pull-request-branch operations

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3. GitHub API Response Size Limits

Status: 🔴 UNRESOLVED (Confirmed in current audit)
Severity: HIGH

Description: GitHub MCP API responses exceed 25,000 token limit even with minimal pagination.

Examples Observed:

• Audit workflow (10 runs): 45,637 tokens
• Scout workflow (100 runs): 457,271 tokens
• CI Failure Doctor (100 runs): 140,895 tokens
• Dev workflow (100 runs): Response too large to measure

Impact:

• Cannot use GitHub API as fallback when gh-aw MCP server fails
• Severely limits audit capabilities
• Current audit forced to use perPage=1 or analyze PRs instead of runs

Recommendation:

• Implement streaming or chunked processing for workflow data
• Consider creating summary endpoints that return condensed data
• Store workflow summaries in artifacts for efficient querying

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✅ Improvements Detected

Recent Wins

1. Error Pattern Validation Fixed (PR Fix error pattern false positives in workflow validation #1501)

   • Eliminated false positives from filenames containing "error"
   • All 64 workflows recompiled with improved patterns
   • Uses word boundaries (\berror\b) instead of substring matching

2. MCP Authentication Improvements (PR Fix genaiscript workflow to pass GitHub token for MCP authentication #1496)

   • Fixed genaiscript 403 authentication errors
   • Added GITHUB_TOKEN to genaiscript execution environment

3. Enhanced MCP Debugging (PR Add maximum debug tracing and logging to simonw-llm.md MCP server configuration #1494)

   • Added LLM_TOOLS_MCP_FULL_ERRORS=1 for full error stack traces
   • Added --td and -u flags for tool execution details and token usage
   • MCP server logs now uploaded as artifacts
   • Comprehensive diagnostic output added

4. Security Hardening (PR [security-fix] Add explicit permissions to CI workflow jobs #1495)

   • Added explicit permissions: contents: read to all CI jobs
   • Follows principle of least privilege
   • Reduces attack surface if workflow compromised

5. Toolset Configuration (PR 🤖 Add --toolsets all to GitHub workflow configurations #1500)

   • Added --toolsets all to workflow configurations
   • Improved import syntax processing

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📈 Workflow Health Comparison

From October 10 Audit

Workflow	Success Rate	Status	Primary Issue
Scout	3.5%	🔴 CRITICAL	Unknown - needs investigation
Audit Agent	0.0%	🔴 CRITICAL	MCP server init failure
Tidy	30.4%	🟡 NEEDS ATTENTION	Multiple issues
CI	49.3%	🟡 NEEDS ATTENTION	Various errors
Changeset Generator	82.0%	🟡 GOOD	Branch deletion race condition
Doc Build	100.0%	🟢 HEALTHY	No issues
Integration Test	98.7%	🟢 HEALTHY	Minimal issues

Note: Current audit cannot verify if recent fixes improved these rates due to MCP server unavailability.

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🔧 Active Issues (From Open Issues)

New Issues Opened (Last 24h)

1. Issue Slack MCP support #1478: Slack MCP support investigation

   • Research best practices for Slack MCP integration
   • Overview of capabilities
   • Customer automation scenarios

2. Issue Simplify docs scaffolding #1433: Simplify docs scaffolding

   • Reorganize documentation for gradual complexity introduction
   • 15 comments - active discussion

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📊 Recent Activity Metrics

Pull Request Activity (Last 24h)

• Total PRs Merged: 5
• Average Time to Merge: ~1.5 hours (excellent!)
• Primary Contributors: Copilot (4 PRs), dsyme (1 PR)

Workflow Activity

• Total Workflows: 53 active workflows in repository
• Agentic Workflows: 13+ identified
• Most Active (from previous audit): CI (136 runs), Scout (85 runs), Integration Tests (78 runs)

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🎯 Recommendations

🚨 Critical Priority (P0)

1. Fix gh-aw MCP Server Initialization

   • Root cause: MCP server not properly configured in audit workflow environment
   • Impact: Entire audit system limited to PR analysis
   • Action: Enable gh-aw HTTP server during audit workflow execution

2. Investigate Scout Workflow Failures

   • Success rate: 3.5% (96.5% failure rate is catastrophic)
   • Action: Deep-dive analysis of failed runs to identify root cause
   • Consider: Temporarily disable until fixed to save CI resources

⚙️ High Priority (P1)

3. Resolve Missing Agent Logs Issue

   • Frequency: 22% of failures
   • Action: Investigate why /tmp/gh-aw/agent-stdio.log is not consistently created
   • Impact: Blocks debugging and error validation

4. Fix Branch Deletion Race Condition

   • Frequency: 33% of Changeset Generator failures
   • Action: Add branch existence validation before push operations
   • Low effort, high impact fix

5. Implement Workflow Data Streaming

   • Issue: GitHub API responses exceed token limits
   • Action: Create chunked/streaming approach for large workflow data
   • Alternative: Store summaries in structured artifacts

🔮 Medium Priority (P2)

6. Monitor Effectiveness of Recent Fixes

   • Track if error pattern fix reduces false positives
   • Verify genaiscript authentication is stable
   • Confirm MCP debugging improvements help diagnose issues

7. Continue Security Hardening

   • PR [security-fix] Add explicit permissions to CI workflow jobs #1495 resolved 2 CodeQL alerts
   • Review remaining security alerts
   • Apply similar permission scoping to other workflows

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📁 Cache Memory Updated

Audit data stored for historical tracking:

/tmp/gh-aw/cache-memory/
├── audits/
│   ├── index.json              ✅ Updated
│   ├── 2025-10-10.json         ✅ Historical (500 runs)
│   └── 2025-10-11.json         ✅ Created (current audit)
└── patterns/
    └── mcp-failures.json       ✅ Updated

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🔄 Historical Context

Audit #2 - October 11, 2025

This is the second automated audit by the Agentic Workflow Audit Agent.

Comparison with Audit #1 (October 10):

Metric	Oct 10	Oct 11	Trend
PRs Merged	N/A	5	✅ Active development
Critical Issues	2	2	🔴 Unchanged
High Priority Issues	3	3	🔴 Unchanged
Fixes Deployed	0	5	✅ Excellent response
MCP Server Available	No	No	🔴 Still blocked

Key Insight: Strong development velocity (5 fixes merged) but core infrastructure issues (MCP server, Scout workflow) remain unresolved.

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🚧 Audit Limitations

This audit was conducted with the following limitations:

1. No Direct Log Access: gh-aw MCP server unavailable
2. No Run-Level Analysis: GitHub API responses too large for bulk querying
3. Historical Data Only: Relying on previous audit + PR activity
4. No Performance Metrics: Cannot analyze token usage, costs, or turn counts
5. No Real-time Failure Analysis: Cannot examine specific failed runs

Recommendation: Fixing the MCP server issue is critical to restore full audit capabilities.

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📅 Next Steps

Immediate Actions

• Fix gh-aw MCP server initialization (P0)
• Investigate Scout workflow failures (P0)
• Add branch validation to Changeset Generator (P1)
• Investigate missing agent log files (P1)

Monitoring

• Verify error pattern fix effectiveness in next 24h
• Monitor genaiscript authentication stability
• Track if enhanced MCP debugging helps diagnose issues
• Observe Scout workflow behavior after any fixes

Next Audit

Scheduled: 2025-10-12 00:27:30 UTC (Daily)

Goals for Next Audit:

• Verify MCP server is functional
• Analyze actual workflow run logs
• Compare success rates before/after recent fixes
• Measure impact of improvements

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📚 Data Sources

• Previous audit reports: #1449, #1444
• Recent PRs merged: Fix error pattern false positives in workflow validation #1501, 🤖 Add --toolsets all to GitHub workflow configurations #1500, Fix genaiscript workflow to pass GitHub token for MCP authentication #1496, [security-fix] Add explicit permissions to CI workflow jobs #1495, Add maximum debug tracing and logging to simonw-llm.md MCP server configuration #1494
• Open issues: Slack MCP support #1478, Simplify docs scaffolding #1433
• GitHub repository metadata (53 workflows)
• Cache memory: /tmp/gh-aw/cache-memory/audits/2025-10-11.json

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🎖️ Notable Achievements

🏆 Fast Issue Resolution: 5 PRs merged within 24 hours of October 10 audit
🔒 Security Improvements: CodeQL alerts resolved, permissions properly scoped
🔍 Enhanced Debugging: Multiple PRs improved observability and error reporting
🤖 High Automation: Copilot contributed 4 of 5 fixes (80% automation rate)

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Report generated by Agentic Workflow Audit Agent
Analysis Period: 2025-10-10 00:30 UTC to 2025-10-11 00:30 UTC
Audit Run: Current execution

🤖 AI generated by Agentic Workflow Audit Agent

AI generated by Agentic Workflow Audit Agent

[pelikhan]

/dev

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This discussion was automatically closed because it was created by an agentic workflow more than 1 month ago.