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Description
Most workflows here write their frontmatter description as a literal block (description: |): 20 of them, against 3 that use > and the rest that use a plain string. The descriptions are prose wrapped at about 80 columns, so | keeps that source wrapping as real newlines in the value. Switching them to >- (folded, no trailing newline) would give the sentence as written.
Where the description ends up
gh aw compile copies description into two places in the lock file:
-
The header comment at the top of
*.lock.yml. -
WORKFLOW_DESCRIPTION, an env var on the threat-detection job.setup_threat_detection.cjssubstitutes it into the detector's prompt, where the template puts it inside a bullet:- Workflow name: {WORKFLOW_NAME} - Workflow description: {WORKFLOW_DESCRIPTION} - Full workflow instructions and context in the prompt file
The second one is what the description is for at runtime: it tells the detector what the workflow is meant to do, so it can judge whether the agent's output fits.
What | does to it
With issue-triage.md as it is today, the compiled value is:
WORKFLOW_DESCRIPTION: "Triages new and reopened issues by assessing completeness, setting issue type\nand priority labels, finding duplicates, and posting a concise maintainer-facing\nreport with actionable next steps."so the detector receives:
- Workflow description: Triages new and reopened issues by assessing completeness, setting issue type
and priority labels, finding duplicates, and posting a concise maintainer-facing
report with actionable next steps.
The line breaks come from the editor's wrap column, not from the meaning, and they break the bullet the template sets up. A model will most likely still read it correctly, so this is a tidiness fix, not a bug. But the value is going into a prompt, and >- gives exactly the one-line string the template expects:
- Workflow description: Triages new and reopened issues by assessing completeness, setting issue type and priority labels, finding duplicates, and posting a concise maintainer-facing report with actionable next steps.
Cost
The source .md looks the same: same indentation, same wrapping, one changed indicator. When compiled with gh-aw v0.89.21, the only other lock-file changes are frontmatter_hash and the header comment, which becomes one long line instead of three wrapped ones. Nobody needs to read that comment closely, since the .md is right there.
I made this change to a copy of issue-triage.md in my own repo: shbernal/pptx-ts#276.
Suggestion
Change description: | to description: >- in the workflows that use it and recompile. The three that use > could become >- too, which drops the trailing newline (the compiler already trims it, so in practice they produce the same output). If you'd take a PR for this, I'm happy to send one.
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