🔍 Agentic Workflow Audit Report - 2025-10-11

[github-actions[bot]]

Audit Summary

• Period: Last 24 hours (2025-10-10 to 2025-10-11)
• Workflows Analyzed: 54 active workflows
• Audit Agent Runs Analyzed: 5 recent runs
• Critical Issues Found: 1 HIGH severity
• Success Rate: Audit workflow failing at 80% rate

🚨 Critical Finding: Audit Agent Self-Inflicted Failure

Issue

The Agentic Workflow Audit Agent itself is consistently failing due to error pattern false positives in its validation step.

Root Cause

The error validation regex patterns are too aggressive and match legitimate content in GitHub API responses (issue bodies, PR descriptions) that contain words like "error", "permission", "denied", etc.

Example False Positive:
When the audit agent reads logs containing PR descriptions about fixing error patterns (like PR #1501), the validation step matches text like:

"error...permission...denied" in a PR body describing error pattern fixes

This triggers the error validation to fail, even though this is not an actual error - it's just descriptive text about what was fixed.

Impact

• 4 out of 5 recent audit runs failed (runs Remove ai-inference, opencode, genaiscript agentic engines for now #10-13)
• Current run (codex naming #14) is in progress
• The audit agent cannot complete its monitoring mission
• No automated health checks are succeeding

Affected Workflow Runs

• Run Add codex test action #13 (18421574288) - Failed - Oct 11, 00:27 UTC
• Run Weekly Research Report: AI Workflow Automation Landscape and Strategic Opportunities - August 2025 #12 (18397852165) - Failed - Oct 10, 05:58 UTC
• Run Fix orphan removal on "gh aw remove" #11 (18397048120) - Failed - Oct 10, 05:08 UTC
• Run Remove ai-inference, opencode, genaiscript agentic engines for now #10 (18396323770) - Failed - Oct 10, 04:19 UTC

Error Pattern Details

The following regex patterns are causing false positives:

(?i)\berror\b.*permission.*denied
(?i)\berror\b.*unauthorized
(?i)\berror\b.*forbidden
(?i)\berror\b.*access.*restricted
(?i)\berror\b.*insufficient.*permission

These patterns match ANY line containing these words in sequence, regardless of context.

📊 Other Agentic Workflow Activity

✅ Working Workflows

The following agentic workflows are functioning correctly:

Workflow	Status	Recent Activity
Duplicate Code Detector	✅ Working	Created issue #1564 on Oct 11
Scout	✅ Working	Multiple scout requests processed
CLI Version Checker	✅ Working	Monitoring CLI versions
Issue Classifier	✅ Working	Classifying issues

Issues Created by Workflows (Last 24h)

1. [duplicate-code] 🔍 Duplicate Code Detected in MCP CLI helpers #1564 - Duplicate code detected in MCP CLI helpers (code-quality)
2. Code scanning alerts #1546 - Code scanning alerts inquiry
3. e2e failures: test-*-mcp and test-*-safe-jobs #1533 - E2E test failures
4. Slack MCP support #1478 - Slack MCP support investigation
5. Simplify docs scaffolding #1433 - Docs scaffolding simplification

🔧 Recommendations

Priority: HIGH

Fix Error Pattern Validation in Audit Workflow

The current error validation needs to be more context-aware. Recommended fixes:

1. Exclude GitHub API Response Bodies

   • Don't validate content of issues/PRs/comments fetched via API
   • Only validate the agent's own stdout/stderr logs

2. Add Context Awareness

   • Check if "error" appears in actual error messages vs. descriptive text
   • Require error messages to have specific formatting (e.g., ERROR:, Error:, log level prefixes)

3. Create Allowlist Patterns

   • Allow patterns like "error-pattern-safety" (filenames)
   • Allow "fixing error patterns" (PR descriptions)
   • Allow "error handling code" (technical descriptions)

4. Separate Validation Scopes

   • Validate agent logs separately from fetched content
   • Apply different rules to different content types

Priority: MEDIUM

Improve Audit Agent Resilience

1. Add fallback mechanisms for log collection when MCP server is unavailable
2. Implement graceful degradation when authentication fails
3. Better error handling and reporting
4. Don't fail the entire audit if one component fails

Priority: MEDIUM

Add Success Rate Monitoring

Track success rates of all agentic workflows over time to detect degradation early.

📁 Historical Context

This appears to be an ongoing issue since at least October 10, 2025. The audit agent has not successfully completed in recent history due to this validation bug.

🎯 Next Steps

• Review and update error validation patterns in audit workflow
• Test updated patterns against recent failed runs
• Consider excluding API response content from validation
• Add integration tests for error pattern validation
• Monitor audit workflow success rate after fix

📈 Audit Metadata

• Audit Date: 2025-10-11
• Audit Method: GitHub Actions API analysis via MCP
• Runs Analyzed: 5 (Audit Agent workflow)
• Cache Updated: /tmp/gh-aw/cache-memory/audits/
• Error Patterns Documented: /tmp/gh-aw/cache-memory/patterns/errors.json

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This report was automatically generated by the Agentic Workflow Audit Agent. The audit data has been persisted to cache memory for historical trend analysis.

AI generated by Agentic Workflow Audit Agent

[pelikhan]

Mark said error pattens as "warnings".

[pelikhan]

@copilot implement suggestion.

[github-actions[bot]]

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