🔍 Agentic Workflow Audit Report - October 21, 2025 03:10 UTC

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🔍 Agentic Workflow Audit Report - October 21, 2025 03:10 UTC

Executive Summary

Audit Period: Last 24 hours (2025-10-20 03:10 UTC to 2025-10-21 03:10 UTC)
Overall Health Status: ⚠️ CONCERNING
Reason: Critical Tidy workflow failure rate of 69% requires immediate attention

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Audit Statistics

• Runs Analyzed: 43 workflow runs
• Total Duration: 3.4 hours
• Success Rate: 74% (32 successful / 43 total, excluding in-progress)
• Total Cost: $10.49
• Total Tokens: 15,337,388
• Total Errors: 449
• Total Warnings: 122
• Missing Tools: 1

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Workflow Activity Breakdown

Most Active Workflows

Workflow	Runs	Success	Failure	Cancelled	Success Rate
Tidy	13	2	9	2	15% ⚠️
Changeset Generator	9	8	1	0	89% ✅
Dev	6	4	2	0	67%
Agentic Workflow Audit Agent	5	4	0	1	100% ✅
Dev Hawk	5	4	1	0	80%
Documentation Unbloat	1	1	0	0	100% ✅
Security Fix PR	1	1	0	0	100% ✅

Activity by AI Agent

• Claude: 24 runs (56%)
• Copilot: 19 runs (44%)
• Codex: 0 runs (0%)

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🚨 Critical Issues

1. Tidy Workflow Failure Rate (CRITICAL)

Severity: 🔴 CRITICAL
Impact: High - Code quality automation severely degraded

Problem: The Tidy workflow has a catastrophic 69% failure rate (9 failed + 2 cancelled out of 13 runs in 24h). Only 2 runs succeeded.

Error Patterns Identified:

• not found: ${logPath} - Shell variable expansion failing in log parsing steps (6 occurrences)
• Permission denied and could not request permission from user (6 occurrences)
• Detection job failed with exit code 1
• GH_AW_ERROR_PATTERNS configuration parsing errors

Affected Runs:

• 18669532820 - cancelled
• 18669493212 - cancelled
• 18669980853 - failure
• 18670417753 - failure
• 18670633364 - failure
• 18669579511 - failure
• 18669157809 - failure
• 18668883871 - failure
• 18668594417 - failure
• 18667949379 - failure

Recommendations:

1. Immediate: Review Tidy workflow configuration for shell variable expansion issues
2. Fix the ${logPath} variable reference in parsing steps (steps 35 and 37)
3. Add proper error handling for permission denied scenarios
4. Simplify validation steps or add fallback mechanisms
5. Test the workflow manually in a debug mode

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Error Analysis

Total Error Count: 449 errors across 43 runs

Average: 10.4 errors per run

Error Categories

Category	Count	Severity	Workflows Affected
Shell Variable Errors	6+	MEDIUM	Tidy
Permission Errors	6+	LOW	Tidy
Config Parse Errors	3+	MEDIUM	Tidy
Job Failures	1	HIGH	Tidy

Note: Most errors are concentrated in the Tidy workflow. Other workflows show normal error rates.

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Missing Tools Analysis

Tools Requested But Not Available: 1

Tool	Count	Workflow	Reason	Status
create-agent-task	1	Dev	Create GitHub Copilot agent task programmatically	FEATURE_REQUEST

Analysis: This is a legitimate feature request. The Dev workflow (run 18658117709) attempted to create a GitHub Copilot agent task with a 3-word poem but the tool was not available.

Recommendation:

• Priority: LOW
• Monitor if this becomes a recurring need
• If requested frequently, consider adding to safe-outputs MCP server
• Current workaround: Manual issue creation via GitHub UI or gh CLI

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MCP Server Health

Status: ✅ EXCELLENT

Good News: No MCP server failures detected in this audit period!

This is a significant improvement from previous audits where gh-aw MCP timeout errors (MCP error -32001: Request timed out) were common. The MCP timeout issues appear to have been resolved.

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Performance Metrics

Cost Analysis

• Total Cost (24h): $10.49
• Average Cost/Run: $0.24
• Total Tokens: 15.3M tokens

Most Expensive Workflows

Workflow	Cost	Tokens	Runs
Documentation Unbloat	$1.28	2,525,103	1
Security Fix PR	$1.08	1,964,605	1
Audit Agent (avg)	$0.87	1,291,605	4
Changeset Generator (avg)	$0.27	317,185	9

Token Usage by Agent

• Claude: ~11M tokens (documentation, analysis, security workflows)
• Copilot: ~4M tokens (dev workflows)
• Codex: 0 tokens (no runs)

Observation: Documentation and security workflows are naturally expensive due to their comprehensive analysis requirements. This is expected behavior.

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Tool Usage Statistics

Top 10 Most Used Tools:

1. github (MCP) - 235 calls across 15 runs
2. TodoWrite - 97 calls across 17 runs
3. Read - 73 calls across 21 runs
4. safe_outputs (MCP) - 43 calls across 14 runs
5. gh-aw_audit (MCP) - 20 calls across 5 runs
6. Write - 18 calls across 16 runs
7. Edit - 12 calls across 3 runs
8. gh-aw_logs (MCP) - 11 calls across 5 runs
9. Bash (git) - 9+ calls for git operations
10. safe_outputs_push_to_pull_request_branch - 10 calls across 10 runs

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Historical Context

Compared to Previous Audits

Improvements ✅:

• No MCP timeout errors (was HIGH priority issue)
• Missing tools count remains very low (1 vs 0 previously)
• Most workflows maintaining good health

Stable ➡️:

• Overall error patterns similar
• Cost per run stable
• Agent distribution similar

Degradation ⚠️:

• Tidy workflow failure rate increased dramatically (was ~40%, now 69%)
• Total error count elevated due to Tidy failures

Trend Analysis

The Tidy workflow appears to have introduced a regression or encountered an environment change that's causing systematic failures. This needs urgent investigation as it affects code quality automation.

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Recommendations

🔴 CRITICAL Priority

1. Fix Tidy Workflow Immediately

The 69% failure rate is unacceptable and indicates a broken automation process.

Action Items:

• Review Tidy workflow YAML configuration
• Fix shell variable expansion in steps 35 and 37 (${logPath})
• Add error handling for permission denied scenarios
• Test workflow manually with debugging enabled
• Consider simplifying validation logic
• Add fallback mechanisms for failed steps

Estimated Impact: Restore code quality automation, reduce error noise

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🟠 HIGH Priority

2. Reduce Error Noise

449 errors across 43 runs creates significant noise in logs.

Action Items:

• Categorize errors by severity (critical/warning/info)
• Filter out expected/harmless errors from logs
• Improve error messages to be more actionable
• Add error suppression for known harmless patterns

Estimated Impact: Clearer logs, easier debugging

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🟡 MEDIUM Priority

3. Optimize High-Cost Workflows

Documentation and audit workflows cost $1+ per run.

Action Items:

• Profile token usage in expensive workflows
• Implement caching for repeated analysis
• Use more targeted context selection
• Consider pagination for large datasets

Estimated Impact: 20-40% cost reduction for expensive workflows

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🟢 LOW Priority

4. Evaluate create-agent-task Tool

One request for programmatic agent task creation.

Action Items:

• Monitor frequency of this request over next week
• Design API if it becomes recurring need
• Add to safe-outputs MCP if validated

Estimated Impact: Improved workflow automation capabilities

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Detailed Run Information

Logs Location: /tmp/gh-aw/aw-mcp/logs

Cache Memory Updated:

• ✅ Audit report: /tmp/gh-aw/cache-memory/audits/2025-10-21-03-10.json
• ✅ Error patterns: /tmp/gh-aw/cache-memory/patterns/errors.json
• ✅ Missing tools: /tmp/gh-aw/cache-memory/patterns/missing-tools.json
• ✅ MCP failures: /tmp/gh-aw/cache-memory/patterns/mcp-failures.json
• ✅ Audit index: /tmp/gh-aw/cache-memory/audits/index.json

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Next Steps

1. Immediate: Investigate and fix Tidy workflow failures
2. Today: Review error categorization and filtering
3. This Week: Monitor Tidy workflow recovery and track create-agent-task requests
4. This Month: Implement cost optimization for expensive workflows

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Audit Metadata

• Audit Run ID: 18671605535
• Audit Workflow: Agentic Workflow Audit Agent
• Audit Agent: Claude (Sonnet 4.5)
• Audit Timestamp: 2025-10-21T03:10:00Z
• Logs Collected: 43 runs (timeout reached at 50s)
• Data Source: gh-aw MCP server logs tool

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Report Generated By: Agentic Workflow Audit Agent
Report Status: Complete ✅

AI generated by Agentic Workflow Audit Agent

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