ci/ai: make the /investigate agent reliably deliver its findings#172151
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The /investigate agent sometimes finished a successful investigation without its analysis ever reaching the issue: instead of writing artifacts/findings.md (which a later workflow step posts), it tried to post the comment itself via gh issue comment — denied by the sandbox — and saved its report under /tmp. The post step then found no file and fell back to "Investigation did not produce findings," forcing a human to copy the analysis out of the workflow run by hand. Two complementary changes: - Reframe the agent prompt so the report file is its sole deliverable and remove every cue that the output becomes a posted comment — the likely source of the temptation to post directly. The feedback footer, the most explicit such cue, moves from the agent's template into the workflow's post step. - Add a recovery step that, when artifacts/findings.md is absent, extracts the agent's final summary from the action's execution-output JSON and writes it to the file. This is defense-in-depth: it also covers the agent failing to write the file for unrelated reasons (out of turns, crash mid-write). A missing file now reflects a genuinely empty investigation rather than a misrouted one. Epic: none Release note: None
rail
approved these changes
Jun 30, 2026
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The /investigate agent sometimes finished a successful investigation without its analysis ever reaching the issue: instead of writing artifacts/findings.md (which a later workflow step posts), it tried to post the comment itself via gh issue comment — denied by the sandbox — and saved its report under /tmp. The post step then found no file and fell back to "Investigation did not produce findings," forcing a human to copy the analysis out of the workflow run by hand.
Two complementary changes:
Reframe the agent prompt so the report file is its sole deliverable and remove every cue that the output becomes a posted comment — the likely source of the temptation to post directly. The feedback footer, the most explicit such cue, moves from the agent's template into the workflow's post step.
Add a recovery step that, when artifacts/findings.md is absent, extracts the agent's final summary from the action's execution-output JSON and writes it to the file. This is defense-in-depth: it also covers the agent failing to write the file for unrelated reasons (out of turns, crash mid-write). A missing file now reflects a genuinely empty investigation rather than a misrouted one.
Epic: none
Release note: None