Weekly Update – March 23, 2026

Mar 23, 2026

Another week, another flurry of releases in github/gh-aw. Eight versions shipped between March 18 and March 21, pushing security hardening, extensibility, and performance improvements across the board. Here’s what you need to know.

Releases This Week

v0.62.5 — March 21

The latest release leads with two important security fixes:

Supply chain protection: The Trivy vulnerability scanner action was removed after a supply chain compromise was discovered (#22007, #22065). Scanning has been replaced with a safer alternative.
Public repo integrity hardening (#21969): GitHub App authentication no longer exempts public repositories from the minimum-integrity guard policy, closing a gap where untrusted content could bypass integrity checks.

On the feature side:

Timezone support for on.schedule (#22018): Cron entries now accept an optional timezone field — finally, no more mental UTC arithmetic when you want your workflow to run “at 9 AM Pacific”.
Boolean expression optimizer (#22025): Condition trees are optimized at compile time, generating cleaner if: expressions in compiled workflows.
Wildcard target-repo in safe-output handlers (#21877): Use target-repo: "*" to write a single handler definition that works across any repository.

v0.62.3 — March 20

This one is a standout for extensibility and speed:

Custom Actions as Safe Output Tools (#21752): You can now expose any GitHub Action as an MCP tool via the new safe-outputs.actions block. The compiler resolves action.yml at compile time to derive the tool schema and inject it into the agent — no custom wiring needed. This opens the door to a whole ecosystem of reusable safe-output handlers built from standard Actions.
~20 seconds faster per workflow run (#21873): A bump to DefaultFirewallVersion v0.24.5 eliminates a 10-second shutdown delay for both the agent container and the threat detection container. That’s 20 free seconds on every single run.
trustedBots support in MCP Gateway (#21865): Pass an allowlist of additional GitHub bot identities to the MCP Gateway, enabling safe cross-bot collaboration in guarded environments.
gh-aw-metadata v3 (#21899): Lock files now embed the configured agent ID/model in the gh-aw-metadata comment, making audits much easier.

v0.62.2 — March 19

! Breaking change alert: lockdown: true is gone. It has been replaced by the more expressive min-integrity field. If you have lockdown: false in your frontmatter, remove it — it’s no longer recognized. The new integrity-level system gives you finer control over what content can trigger your workflows.

This release also introduces integrity filtering for log analysis — the gh aw logs command can now filter to only runs where DIFC integrity events were triggered, making security investigations much faster.

v0.62.0 — March 19

The GitHub MCP guard policy graduates to general availability. The policy automatically configures appropriate access controls on the GitHub MCP server at runtime — no manual lockdown configuration required. Also new: inline custom safe-output scripts, letting you define JavaScript handlers directly in your workflow frontmatter without a separate file.

v0.61.x — March 18

Three patch releases covered:

Signed-commit support for protected branches (v0.61.1)
Broader ecosystem domain coverage for language package registries (v0.61.2)
Critical workflow_dispatch expression evaluation fix (v0.61.2)

Notable Pull Requests

Several important fixes landed today (March 23):

Propagate assign_copilot failures to agent failure comment (#22371): When assign_copilot_to_created_issues fails (e.g., bad credentials), the failure context is now surfaced in the agent failure issue so you can actually diagnose it.
Post failure comment when agent assignment fails (#22347): A follow-up to the above — the failure now also posts a comment directly on the target issue or PR for immediate visibility.
Hot-path regexp and YAML parse elimination (#22359): Redundant regexp compilations and YAML re-parses on the hot path have been eliminated, improving throughput for high-volume workflow execution.
blocked-users and approval-labels in guard policy (#22360): The tools.github guard policy now supports blocked-users and approval-labels fields, giving you more granular control over who can trigger guarded workflows.
Pull merged workflow files after GitHub confirms readiness (#22335): A race condition where merged workflow files were pulled before GitHub reported the workflow as ready has been fixed.

Agent of the Week: contribution-check

Your tireless four-hourly guardian of PR quality — reads every open pull request and evaluates it against CONTRIBUTING.md for compliance and completeness.

contribution-check ran five times this week (once every four hours, as scheduled) and processed a steady stream of incoming PRs, creating issues for contributors who needed guidance, adding labels, and leaving review comments. Four of five runs completed in under 5 minutes with 6–9 turns. The fifth run, however, apparently found the task of reviewing PRs during a particularly active Sunday evening so intellectually stimulating that it worked through 50 turns and consumed 1.55 million tokens — roughly 5× its usual appetite — before the safe_outputs step politely called it a night. It still managed to file issues, label PRs, and post comments on the way out. Overachiever.

One earlier run also hit a minor hiccup: the pre-agent filter step forgot to write its output file, leaving the agent with nothing to evaluate. Rather than fabricating a list of PRs to review, it dutifully reported “missing data” and moved on. Sometimes the bravest thing is knowing when there’s nothing to do.

Usage tip: The contribution-check pattern works best when your CONTRIBUTING.md is explicit and opinionated — the more specific your guidelines, the more actionable its feedback will be for contributors.

→ View the workflow on GitHub

Try It Out

Update to v0.62.5 to pick up the security fixes and timezone support. If you’ve been holding off on migrating from lockdown: true, now’s the time — check the v0.62.2 release notes for the migration path. As always, contributions and feedback are welcome in github/gh-aw.