GitHub Agentic Workflows (gh-aw) is an agent orchestration harness and GitHub CLI extension created by GitHub to deploy and automate AI coding agents within GitHub repositories and GitHub Actions pipelines. It functions as an orchestration layer that standardizes how autonomous agents execute repository tasks. Through the GitHub CLI and automated repository workflows, gh-aw manages execution environments, credentials, and tooling for agent systems including GitHub Copilot SWE agent, Claude Code, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Unlike interactive, standalone TUI coding assistants that focus exclusively on a developer's local prompt session, gh-aw is designed to orchestrate background and CI/CD-driven agentic loops. It automates agent actions across issues, pull requests, and automated workflows while maintaining safety boundaries through sandboxed enclaves and workflow validation. The project is open source on GitHub and operates against your configured AI provider credentials (such as GitHub Copilot or Anthropic/Claude tokens) and GitHub Actions infrastructure.
Tags: agent harness, ai agent, cli, coding agent, developer tools