AI Native CI CD

AI-Native CI / CD

Apply this skill whenever you are creating or modifying a CI/CD workflow file (.github/workflows/*.yml, similar for GitLab CI, CircleCI, etc.). Bad CI rules turn AI productivity into a cloud bill.

Hard rules

1. No on: push full deploys to production.
2. Expensive workflows trigger on pull_request or workflow_dispatch.
3. AI branches never auto-deploy to production. Only main does.
4. High-frequency edits must be debounced.

Recommended triggers

# Preview deploys — PRs only
on:
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, synchronize, reopened]

# Production deploys — merge into main only
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]

# Expensive ad-hoc workflows — manual only
on:
  workflow_dispatch:

Forbidden triggers

# Do NOT do this
on:
  push:                # any branch, every push
on:
  push:
    branches: ['**']

Debounce patterns to add by default

Concurrency group (almost always include this)

concurrency:
  group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}
  cancel-in-progress: true

Path filters for docs-only / config-only changes

on:
  pull_request:
    paths-ignore:
      - 'docs/**'
      - '**/*.md'
      - 'LICENSE'

Production deploy gating

If you add a deploy step:

• Production deploy must come from main only.
• It should require status checks on the PR that produced the commit.
• Use a GitHub environment named production with required reviewers and a wait timer.

Secrets

• Never log full env. Mask secrets in any debug output.
• Secrets must not be available to fork-PR workflows by default.
• Production secrets belong to the production environment, not to repo-level Actions secrets.

When generating CI for a new repo

Start from the template in templates/.github/workflows/preview.yml in the agents-md repo (or copy below):

name: Preview
on:
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, synchronize, reopened]
    paths-ignore:
      - 'docs/**'
      - '**/*.md'

concurrency:
  group: preview-${{ github.ref }}
  cancel-in-progress: true

jobs:
  check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: echo "lint, type-check, test — and only deploy preview here"

Reference

docs/ci-cd.md and docs/github-settings.md in the agents-md repo.

Source: maweis1981/agents-md — distributed by TomeVault.