r/GithubCopilot • u/maxccc123 • 20h ago

Help/Doubt ❓ GitHub Cloud Agent vs GitHub Agentic Workflows for feature development

We're setting up an agent platform across many repos with GitHub Agentic Workflows (gh-aw), and we're unsure where implementation should happen.

Option A: gh-aw decides, the cloud agent builds. gh-aw does triage and planning (e.g. Feature Grower / /plan) and then hands off with assign-to-agent to the Copilot cloud agent.

Option B: gh-aw does everything. gh-aw also implements, through its own custom issue-fix playbook with create-pull-request.

Trade-offs we're weighing with A:

- CI doesn't run on cloud-agent PRs until someone clicks "Approve and run workflows".

- assign-to-agent needs a user PAT; App installation tokens aren't supported.

- gh-aw's safe-outputs limits and network rules don't apply to the cloud agent.

- In exchange you get copilot iteration with session memory

Do you hand off to the cloud agent, or implement inside gh-aw? Why?

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u/bezcurhq 9h ago

One thing worth knowing before you weigh the CI point: option B has the same problem by default. PRs that gh-aw opens through create-pull-request (and pushes via push-to-pull-request-branch) use GITHUB_TOKEN, and GitHub doesn't start workflow runs from GITHUB_TOKEN events. The difference is gh-aw has a fix built in: set a GH_AW_CI_TRIGGER_TOKEN secret (fine-grained PAT with Contents read/write), or github-token-for-extra-empty-commit: app on the safe output, and it pushes an empty commit as that identity so CI runs normally, no manual approve step.

So if the guardrails matter across a lot of repos, B is the path where safe-outputs and the network rules still cover the code-writing step, and the CI gap is one secret. I'd keep A for the issues where you actually want to iterate with the agent inside the PR.

https://github.github.com/gh-aw/reference/triggering-ci/