DailyOps

DailyOps workflows automate incremental progress toward large goals through small, scheduled daily changes. Work happens automatically in manageable pieces that are easy to review and integrate.

The DailyOps Pattern

Scheduled Execution

Workflows run on weekday schedules (avoiding weekends) with workflow_dispatch enabled for manual testing:

---
on:
  schedule: daily on weekdays
  workflow_dispatch:
---

Phased Approach

Work proceeds through three phases with maintainer approval between each:

1. Research - Analyze state, create discussion with findings
2. Configuration - Define steps, create config PR
3. Execution - Make improvements, verify, create draft PRs

Progress Tracking

Use GitHub discussions to maintain continuity across runs. The workflow creates a discussion (if none exists) and adds progress comments on subsequent runs:

safe-outputs:
  create-discussion:
    title-prefix: "${{ github.workflow }}"
    category: "ideas"

The safe-outputs: (validated GitHub operations) configuration lets the AI request discussion creation without requiring write permissions.

Discussion Comments

For workflows that post updates to an existing discussion, use add-comment with a specific target discussion number. Discussion targeting is automatic when the workflow runs in a discussion event context, or when the agent provides an item_number:

safe-outputs:
  add-comment:
    target: "4750"

This pattern is ideal for daily status posts, recurring reports, or community updates. The daily-fact.md workflow demonstrates this by posting daily facts about the repository to a pinned discussion thread.

Persistent Memory

Enable cache-memory to maintain state at /tmp/gh-aw/cache-memory/ across runs, useful for tracking progress, storing metrics, and building knowledge bases over time:

tools:
  cache-memory: true

Common DailyOps Workflows

This repository implements several DailyOps workflows demonstrating different use cases:

• daily-fact.md - Posts daily facts about the repository to a discussion thread
• daily-test-improver.md - Systematically adds tests to improve coverage incrementally
• daily-perf-improver.md - Identifies and implements performance optimizations
• daily-doc-updater.md - Keeps documentation synchronized with merged code changes
• daily-team-status (from agentics) - Creates daily team status reports with activity summaries
• daily-repo-chronicle.md - Produces newspaper-style repository updates
• daily-security-observability.md - Unified security observability report combining firewall traffic analysis and DIFC integrity-filtered event analysis

All follow the phased approach with discussions for tracking and draft pull requests for review.

Related Patterns

• IssueOps - Trigger workflows from issue creation or comments
• ChatOps - Trigger workflows from slash commands in comments
• LabelOps - Trigger workflows when labels change on issues or pull requests
• Planning Workflow - Use /plan command to split large discussions into actionable work items, then assign sub-tasks to Copilot for execution

DailyOps complements these patterns by providing scheduled automation that doesn’t require manual triggers.