[gh-aw-upgrade] gh-aw upgrade available: v0.45.1 → v0.46.0 #98

A new version of gh-aw is available. We are currently on v0.45.1, latest is v0.46.0.

Upgrade Assessment

Urgency: Recommended — no breaking changes affect our workflows directly, but there are security hardening improvements and useful new features worth picking up across 6 releases.

Relevant Changes

v0.46.0

Security

• Injection attack prevention (#16515): Numeric context variables in activation (issue numbers, PR numbers) are now validated to prevent injection attacks via numeric-to-string coercion. Our workflows use $\{\{ github.event.issue.number }} and $\{\{ github.event.pull_request.number }} extensively — this hardens all of them.

New Features Worth Adopting

• Granular discussion permissions (#16509): add-comment and hide-comment safe outputs now support an optional discussions field to control discussions:write permission. We use add-comment in several workflows (gh-aw-issue-triage.md, gh-aw-mention-in-issue.md, gh-aw-mention-in-pr.md). Since we don't need discussion access, we can skip this — but it's good to know the field exists.
• Smart secret detection (#16475): gh aw secrets bootstrap now auto-analyzes workflows to determine required secrets. Useful for onboarding new downstream repos.

Performance

• Faster compilation (#16506): Failed action resolutions are cached per compilation run, reducing compile times.

v0.45.7

Informational

• Mostly editor/playground improvements (WASM, Primer CSS, import support) and LLM gateway routing. No impact on our workflow configurations.
• XSS prevention in editor (#16463) — internal security fix, not relevant to workflow authoring.

v0.45.6

New Features Worth Adopting

• Lock file schema versioning (#16429): Compiled .lock.yml files now include schema version metadata with compatibility validation. We'll get this automatically on recompilation.
• Enhanced assign-to-agent (#16386): New model, custom_agent, and custom_instructions parameters for assign-to-agent frontmatter. We don't currently use assign-to-agent, but useful to know.
• GitHub Enterprise support (#16371): Full GHES support for repo operations. Useful if downstream consumers run on GHES.
• Org-wide GitHub App tokens (#16430): Wildcard repositories: ["*"] for GitHub App tokens. Useful for org-wide deployments.

Security

• Removed top-level GitHub token configuration (#16398): Better security practices. We don't use top-level GitHub token config, so no impact.
• Enhanced SEC-004 compliance (#16454): Sanitization documentation for body-referencing handlers — informational.

v0.45.5

New Features Worth Adopting

• Auto-generated content sanitization (#16378): Workflows triggered by issues, PRs, discussions, or comments now automatically include a sanitization step — no manual configuration needed. All our event-triggered workflows benefit from this automatically.

Bug Fixes

• Permission optimization (#16342): push-to-pull-request-branch no longer requests unnecessary issues:write. Our gh-aw-mention-in-pr.md uses push-to-pr and benefits from this fix.

v0.45.4

New Features Worth Adopting

• Cross-repository PR creation (#16293): assign-to-agent now supports pull-request-repo for cross-repo PRs. We don't use this currently, but potentially useful.
• Pregenerated expression validation (#16277): Expression access patterns pregenerated at compile time, reducing runtime errors. Benefits all workflows automatically.

v0.45.3

Informational

• Maintenance release with lint fixes and automated content moderation workflow. No impact on our workflows.

v0.45.2

Breaking Changes (not affecting us)

• infer: false renamed to disable-model-invocation: true (#16221): Custom agent frontmatter field renamed. We do not use infer: false in any of our workflows, so no action needed.

Bug Fixes

• Playwright MCP initialization fix (#16262): Fixed failures on GitHub Actions runners. We don't use Playwright MCP.
• GitHub Copilot compatibility (#16259): user-invokable added to ignored frontmatter fields. Informational.

Upgrade Steps

• Update GH_AW_VERSION in Makefile from v0.45.1 to v0.46.0
• Run make compile and verify 0 errors, 0 warnings
• Verify lock files are regenerated cleanly (new schema versioning from v0.45.6 will be included)
• Spot-check that push-to-pull-request-branch in gh-aw-mention-in-pr.lock.yml no longer requests issues:write permission

What is this? | From workflow: Gh Aw Upgrade Check

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• expires on Feb 25, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC