Weekly Update – April 20, 2026

Apr 20, 2026

What a week for github/gh-aw! Five releases dropped between April 13 and April 17, delivering a new AI engine, key security improvements, and a wave of reliability fixes. Here’s what you need to know.

Release Highlights

v0.68.7 — April 17

A targeted fix-and-polish release with one standout new addition:

on.roles single-string support (#26789): You can now write roles: write instead of roles: [write]. Previously this produced a confusing compiler error — now it just works.
Codex chroot fix (#26787): Codex workflows on restricted filesystems were failing silently. Runtime state now lives in /tmp where it can actually be written.
Cross-repo compatibility checks (#26802): A new daily Claude workflow automatically discovers repositories using gh-aw and runs compile checks against the latest build. Compatibility regressions now get caught before they reach users.

v0.68.6 — April 17

The headline release of the week, with a brand-new engine and important security improvements:

OpenCode engine — Set engine: opencode to use OpenCode as your agentic engine, joining Copilot, Claude, and Codex as first-class options.
engine.bare mode — Set engine.bare: true to skip loading AGENTS.md. Perfect for triage, reporting, and ops workflows where repository code context just adds noise.
Pre-agent steps — The new pre-agent-steps frontmatter field lets you run custom GitHub Actions steps before the AI agent starts — great for authentication, environment setup, or any prerequisite work.
cache-memory working-tree sanitization — Before each agent run, the working tree is now scanned and cleaned of planted executables and disallowed files from cached memory. This closes a real supply-chain attack vector.

v0.68.5 — April 16

Quality-of-life improvements and more security hardening:

MCP config at .github/mcp.json (#26665): The MCP configuration file has moved from .mcp.json (repo root) to .github/mcp.json, aligning with standard GitHub configuration conventions. The init flow creates the new path automatically.
shared/reporting-otlp.md import bundle (#26655): One import now replaces two for telemetry-enabled reporting workflows.
Environment-level secrets fixed (#26650): The environment: frontmatter field now correctly propagates to the activation job.

v0.68.4 — April 16

A substantial patch resolving 21 community-reported issues:

BYOK Copilot mode (#26544): New byok-copilot feature flag wires offline Copilot support.
SideRepoOps maintenance workflow (#26382): The compiler now auto-generates agentics-maintenance.yml for target repositories in SideRepoOps patterns.
MCP servers as local CLIs (#25928): MCP servers can now be mounted as local CLI commands after the gateway starts, enabling richer tool integrations.

v0.68.3 — April 14

Observability and reliability improvements:

Model-not-supported detection (#26229): When a model is unavailable for your plan, the workflow now stops retrying and surfaces a clear error instead of spinning indefinitely.
Time Between Turns (TBT) metric (#26321): gh aw audit and gh aw logs now report TBT — a key indicator of whether LLM prompt caching is working for your workflows.
env and checkout fields in shared imports (#26113, #26292): Shared importable workflows now support both env: and checkout: fields, eliminating common workarounds.

Agent of the Week: auto-triage-issues

The unsung hero of issue hygiene — reads every unlabeled issue and applies the right labels so the right people see it, automatically, on a schedule.

This week auto-triage-issues kept its usual steady pace, triaging issues as they came in. In one run, it spotted issue #27290 — a question about ecosystem groups in the frontmatter/compilation pipeline — and correctly labeled it compiler within 24 seconds flat. In another run, it encountered an issue that the integrity policy had filtered before the agent could even read the title, so it did the responsible thing: skipped labeling, created a summary discussion, and politely told the maintainers to take a look themselves.

Even when it can’t act, it doesn’t just silently fail — it leaves a breadcrumb so nothing falls through the cracks.

Usage tip: Pair auto-triage-issues with a notify workflow on high-priority labels (like security or breaking-change) so your team gets paged for the things that actually matter.

→ View the workflow on GitHub

Try It Out

With v0.68.7 now available, it’s a great time to update and explore the new OpenCode engine, engine.bare mode, or pre-agent steps. As always, feedback and contributions are very welcome in github/gh-aw.