[aw] SelfCare: has stale lock file

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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Newbie friendliness
72/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
github-actions, yaml
Domain
build-system, ci-cd

Research direction

The failing check compares the SelfCare workflow's source markdown against its compiled .lock.yml; search the repo for the self-care workflow .md file and check whether a .lock.yml sits beside it. Run gh aw compile (and gh aw compile --validate to confirm) after editing, then commit and push the regenerated .lock.yml. If the mismatch came from an install rather than an edit, the issue's own notes say to re-add with an exact SHA and recompile; done means the lock-file check passes on the next main run.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

agentic-workflows
What happened

SelfCare has stale lock file.

View run #41644099611 · Previous failures

Branch: main

Next step

Review the failure details below for a targeted fix, or assign this issue to a coding agent to investigate.

Failure details

[!WARNING]
Lock File Out of Sync: The workflow could not start because its compiled lock file no longer matches the source markdown.

This means the workflow's .md file was edited but gh aw compile was not run afterwards to regenerate the corresponding .lock.yml file. The agent is prevented from running against a stale configuration to avoid unexpected behaviour.

To fix, recompile the workflow:

gh aw compile

Then commit and push the updated .lock.yml file.

More ways to recompile

Using the gh-aw MCP server (if configured):

{
  "tool": "compile",
  "arguments": {
    "validate": true
  }
}

Recompile all workflows at once:

gh aw compile --all

Verify the result:

gh aw compile --validate
How to investigate the mismatch

The workflow run logs contain a verbose debug pass that shows exactly what was hashed. Search the Check workflow lock file step logs for lines starting with [hash-debug] to see:

  • The raw frontmatter text that was used as input
  • Any imported files that were included in the hash
  • The canonical JSON that was fed to SHA-256
  • The resulting hash value

This makes it easy to spot accidental whitespace changes, encoding differences, or import path drift.

This mismatch can also happen on a fresh install (even without any manual edits) if gh aw add <path>@<ref> could not resolve the ref to an exact commit SHA during installation. In that case, rerun the add command with an exact SHA (or retry when API/rate-limit conditions recover), then recompile:

gh aw add <path>@<exact-sha>
gh aw compile
How to disable this check

[!CAUTION]
Disabling this check means the agent can run against an out-of-date compiled workflow. Only disable it if you have an alternative mechanism to keep lock files in sync.

Set stale-check: false in the on: section of your workflow frontmatter:

on:
  issues:
    types: [opened]
  stale-check: false

After editing, recompile the workflow: gh aw compile

Copy a debugging prompt

Paste this into your coding agent:

Debug the agentic workflow "self-care" failure.
Follow https://raw.githubusercontent.com/github/gh-aw/main/debug.md
Failed run: https://github.com/githubnext/gh-cao/actions/runs/41644099611

If the repository includes the agentic-workflows skill, load it before investigating.

Manage failure notifications

To stop creating failure issues for this workflow, set this in its frontmatter and recompile:

safe-outputs:
  report-failure-as-issue: false

This only disables issue reporting; it does not fix the failure.

Generated from SelfCare · ◷

  • expires on Nov 4, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC
Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
8
Forks
5
Avg merge
3h 20m
Merged PRs (30d)
811

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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