Go from zero to automation hero, then level up with agentic automation in the world's most popular CI/CD. This comprehensive workshop starts with your first Actions Workflow and iteratively builds up to real-world pipelines for linting, container building, fan-out testing, and more. You’ll learn common team tactics, including how to template and reuse workflows and how to harden them with proper least-privilege security settings. Then we’ll jump into Agentic Workflows for including LLMs (safely) in your automation. We’ll wrap up the day with the latest ways to use AI for managing your automation empire!

Get hands-on experience with:

• Adding common real-world workflows to repos
• Control, monitor, and troubleshoot jobs
• Setting AI Agent standards for how it should create workflows
• Troubleshooting failed workflows
• Configuring complex Reusable Workflows to keep YAML D.R.Y.
• Locking down Actions to secure your supply chain and avoid secret exfiltration
• Config Dependabot/Renovate to automate dependency updates

AI knows the docs, so we don’t need to memorize the little things. This workshop focuses on patterns and strategies for building and managing Actions:

• Implement GitHub’s latest 2026 features including Agentic Workflows
• Use your Agent harness (Copilot, Claude Code, etc.) to control Actions
• Use 3rd party tools to protect and secure your workflows
• Build your own tools to fill the gaps in Actions management

Bret’s been consulting and teaching GitHub Actions for half a decade. This workshop is an update to the traditional GH Actions playbook, removing much of the “Actions 101” memorization that we needed in the pre-AI world. LLMs will likely be writing most of your YAML, and AI knows the Actions docs well. Between AI’s knowledge of Workflows and modern linters and security scanners, we’re able to free ourselves from knowing the exact right YAML syntax for obscure features or which event trigger is needed in a specific use case. Now that we can delegate those roles to AI, LSPs, and linters, we can become the CEOs of Automation, focusing on setting standards, controlling the automation strategy, and optimizing our Actions system for how our org works. Come have some fun automating your team’s toil with deterministic workflows and non-deterministic Agents!