Weekly Update – September 28, 2026

Sep 28, 2026

It was a big week for github/gh-aw: three releases shipped, a legacy sandbox runtime was retired, and the firewall got noticeably stricter about what agents can reach. Here’s the rundown.

Release: v0.89.22

v0.89.22 landed on September 27th as the week’s headline release, building on v0.89.21 and v0.89.20 from earlier in the week.

! Breaking Change

Docker sbx and gVisor sandbox runtimes removed (#63034) — isolated agent execution now runs exclusively on Cloud Hypervisor. If your workflow frontmatter still sets sandbox.agent.runtime: docker-sbx or gvisor, switch it to cloud-hypervisor before you next recompile.

What’s New

Hosted-web domain policies in frontmatter (#63212) — the new network.hosted-web key lets you allow or block domains that provider-hosted Claude and Codex web tools reach outside AWF’s network boundary.
Firewall enforcement got sharper — Copilot and web tools now get enforced firewall compatibility checks (#63474), scoped precisely to the web tools a workflow actually enables (#63632), while false blocked-domain warnings for otherwise-successful requests were squashed (#63246).
Grouped audit findings mode (#63032) — gh aw audit --group now aggregates findings by run and code with occurrence counts, in pretty, markdown, or JSON output.
More audit visibility — an opt-out for automatic audit baseline downloads (#63012) and MCP payload size reporting in audit (#63687) give workflow authors finer control over what audit runs measure and fetch.
Large Copilot prompts streamed through stdin (#62766, thanks @davidslater!) — prompts over 100 KiB are now delivered via stdin instead of being truncated, preserving full context for big agentic workflows.
Repo-memory backend for daily AIC guardrail (#62958) — memory persistence now supports repository-backed storage for cost accounting.

Notable Fixes

Fixed dangling safe-outputs-app-token references when safe outputs are staged (#63490).
Fixed repo memory retry head refresh authentication (#63497) and prevented cache-memory validation marker EACCES failures (#63498).
Pinned pull_request activation checkout to the base SHA for improved supply-chain safety (#63499).
Fixed slash-command PR prefetch caching and error handling (#63678).

Notable Pull Requests

Add friction-cost attribution to audit and usage artifacts — audit output now attributes friction costs directly, making it easier to spot where workflows are burning extra cycles.
Track skill usage in audit artifacts — you can now see which skills workflows actually invoke, straight from the audit trail.
Surface AWF steering counters in compact audit usage data — steering activity is now visible in the compact usage summary, not just the full report.

Agent of the Week: ci-coach

Meet ci-coach, the CI Optimization Coach that runs daily to hunt down slow, imbalanced, or wasteful spots in gh-aw’s CI pipeline and proposes fixes as pull requests.

This week ci-coach had its hands full with cgo.yml’s notoriously lopsided unit-test shard. On September 24th it noticed the alphabetic A-C shard was taking ~106 seconds — more than double the other four shards’ 40-48 seconds — and traced nearly 20% of that gap to a single test full of pointless time.Sleep-backed cooldowns. It opened a fix (#63187) that reconfigured the mocked rate limit so the test skips its legacy 500ms sleep loop entirely. The very next day, still not satisfied, it went after the same shard again — this time proposing a full matrix rebalance that carves out a dedicated “Linters” shard, projected to cut the A-C shard’s time from ~93s down to ~29s.

Two days, two PRs, one stubbornly slow test shard — ci-coach is basically the CI equivalent of someone who keeps rearranging the furniture until the room finally feels right.

Usage tip: Run this class of workflow on a schedule against your CI config files — it’s great at spotting shard imbalances and dead-weight sleeps that are easy to miss by eye but add up fast across hundreds of runs.

→ View the workflow on GitHub

Try It Out

Update to v0.89.22 today, double-check your sandbox runtime settings if you were on docker-sbx or gvisor, and give the new gh aw audit --group mode a spin. As always, questions and contributions are welcome in github/gh-aw.