Meet the Workflows: Multi-Phase Improvers

Jan 13, 2026

Don Syme

Peli de Halleux

Mara Kiefer

Let’s continue our journey through Peli’s Agent Factory!

In our previous post, we explored infrastructure workflows - the meta-monitoring layer that validates MCP servers, checks tool configurations, and ensures the platform itself stays healthy. These workflows watch the watchers, providing visibility into the invisible plumbing.

Most workflows we’ve seen so far run once and complete: analyze this PR, triage that issue, test this deployment. They’re ephemeral - they execute, produce results, and disappear. But what about projects that are too big to tackle in a single run? What about initiatives that require research, setup, and incremental implementation? Traditional CI/CD is built for stateless execution, but we discovered something powerful: workflows that maintain state across days, working a little bit each day like a persistent team member who never takes breaks. Welcome to our most ambitious experiment - multi-phase improvers that prove AI agents can handle complex, long-running projects.

Multi-Phase Improver Workflows

These are some of our most ambitious agents - they tackle big projects over multiple days:

Daily Backlog Burner - Systematically works through issues and PRs, one day at a time
Daily Perf Improver - Three-phase performance optimization (research, setup, implement)
Daily QA - Continuous quality assurance that never sleeps
Daily Accessibility Review - WCAG compliance checking with Playwright
PR Fix - On-demand slash command to fix failing CI checks (super handy!)

This is where we got experimental with agent persistence and multi-day workflows. Traditional CI runs are ephemeral, but these workflows maintain state across days using repo-memory. The Daily Perf Improver runs in three phases - research (find bottlenecks), setup (create profiling infrastructure), implement (optimize). It’s like having a performance engineer who works a little bit each day. The Daily Backlog Burner systematically tackles our issue backlog - one issue per day, methodically working through technical debt. We learned that incremental progress beats heroic sprints - these agents never get tired, never get distracted, and never need coffee breaks. The PR Fix workflow is our emergency responder - when CI fails, invoke /pr-fix and it investigates and attempts repairs.

These workflows prove that AI agents can handle complex, long-running projects when given the right architecture.

Using These Workflows

You can add these workflows to your own repository and remix them. Get going with our Quick Start, then run one of the following:

Daily Backlog Burner:

gh aw add githubnext/agentics/workflows/daily-backlog-burner.md

Daily Perf Improver:

gh aw add githubnext/agentics/workflows/daily-perf-improver.md

Daily QA:

gh aw add githubnext/agentics/workflows/daily-qa.md

Daily Accessibility Review:

gh aw add githubnext/agentics/workflows/daily-accessibility-review.md

PR Fix:

gh aw add githubnext/agentics/workflows/pr-fix.md

Then edit and remix the workflow specifications to meet your needs, recompile using gh aw compile, and push to your repository. See our Quick Start for further installation and setup instructions.

Learn More

GitHub Agentic Workflows - The technology behind the workflows
Quick Start - How to write and compile workflows

Next Up: Organization & Cross-Repo Workflows

Single-repository workflows are powerful, but what happens when you scale to an entire organization with dozens of repositories?

Continue reading: Organization & Cross-Repo Workflows →

This is part 16 of a 19-part series exploring the workflows in Peli’s Agent Factory.