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Practice: Recognize Agentic Workflows

📋 Before You Start

These exercises help you apply what you just learned — deciding when to use an agentic workflow and drafting your first task brief.

Try it: agentic or standard?

For each task below, decide whether it calls for an agentic workflow or a standard Actions workflow, then reveal the answer.

Task A: Run lint and unit tests on every pull request, fail if any check exits non-zero.

  • I've made my decision for Task A
Reveal Task A answer

Standard Actions workflow. Every run follows the same fixed steps: run lint, run tests, report the exit code. No judgment is required.

Task B: Each morning, read all open issues, decide which ones look most urgent, and post a short triage summary.

  • I've made my decision for Task B
Reveal Task B answer

Agentic workflow. The agent reads live issue data, applies judgment to assess urgency, and composes a summary that differs every run based on what it finds.

Tip

Want to go deeper? Side Quest: Agentic Workflows Deep Dive covers more exercises, example output, the two-file structure, and concept checks.

Try it: write a one-sentence task brief

Pick any routine task you do today that involves reading some data and writing a summary — a daily standup note, a weekly inbox digest, or a triage of support tickets. Write a one-sentence task brief for an agent to do it automatically.

Your brief should answer all three of these: what data should the agent read (data source), what should it post when it's done (output format), and when or how often should it run (cadence)?

Example:

Each Monday morning, read all pull requests opened in the past week,
identify the three with the most review comments, and post a summary
as an issue with the title "Weekly PR Digest".
  • I've drafted a task brief for a real routine task
  • My brief specifies what data the agent should read (data source)
  • My brief specifies what the agent should post when done (output format)
  • My brief specifies when or how often the agent should run (cadence)

Tip

Struggling to think of a task? Browse the gh-aw issue-ops pattern for inspiration. You will write a real version of your brief in Step 7. Still unsure? Pause here and work through Side Quest: Agentic Workflows Deep Dive. It gives you more classification practice, a vocabulary check, and a sample .md / .lock.yml pair before you continue to Step 6.

✅ Checkpoint

  • I can decide whether a task calls for an agentic or a standard Actions workflow
  • I have drafted a task brief that covers all three criteria: data source, output format, and cadence
  • I can describe the three parts of an agentic workflow: trigger → agent → safe output

Next: Install the gh-aw CLI Extension