Stop push-context dispatch storms in Approach Validator and Daily Syntax Error Quality Check

[Copilot]

A burst of unintended invocations exhausted daily AI-credit budgets for approach-validator and daily-syntax-error-quality, causing repeated guardrail preflight failures. This change adds execution gating and stronger dedup semantics so push-context dispatches do not fan out into repeated runs.

• Root-cause containment (event-context guard)

  • Added explicit if guards in both workflow sources to reject dispatch payloads where aw_context.event_type == 'push'.
  • Preserves intended execution paths (schedule for daily syntax checks; issue/PR/comment-driven activation for approach validation).

• Storm dampening (concurrency dedup)

  • Added/updated concurrency with cancel-in-progress: true for both workflows.
  • Uses stable grouping keys per workflow context to collapse overlapping/redundant invocations instead of allowing bursts to queue independently.

• Compiled workflow alignment

  • Regenerated corresponding .lock.yml files so runtime behavior matches source workflow changes.

# daily-syntax-error-quality.md
if: >
  github.event_name == 'schedule' ||
  fromJSON(github.event.inputs.aw_context || '{}').event_type != 'push'
concurrency:
  group: "daily-syntax-error-quality-${{ github.ref }}"
  cancel-in-progress: true

• Fixes [aw-failures] [aw-fix] P0: Find and stop the workflow_dispatch storm hitting Approach Validator + Daily Syntax Error Quality Check #48813

---

Generated by 👨‍🍳 PR Sous Chef · gpt54 · 18.4 AIC · ⌖ 8.65 AIC · ⊞ 7.6K · ◷
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[pelikhan]

@copilot investigate why this AW are triggered on "push" events. The only have label / slash commands should not not trigger on pushes.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Attempts to prevent push-triggered workflow storms and reduce duplicate executions.

Changes:

• Adds push-context execution guards.
• Adds cancel-in-progress concurrency groups.
• Regenerates compiled workflows.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
.github/workflows/daily-syntax-error-quality.md	Adds execution gating and concurrency.
.github/workflows/daily-syntax-error-quality.lock.yml	Compiles the source changes.
.github/workflows/approach-validator.md	Adds execution gating and per-item concurrency.
.github/workflows/approach-validator.lock.yml	Compiles the source changes.

Review details

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• Files reviewed: 4/4 changed files
• Comments generated: 3
• Review effort level: Medium

[Copilot]

@copilot investigate why this AW are triggered on "push" events. The only have label / slash commands should not not trigger on pushes.

Root cause: When copilot agent branches push commits that modify files in .github/workflows/ (e.g., after make recompile regenerates lock files), GitHub evaluates all workflow files in that directory for the push event. For workflow_dispatch-only workflows like these two, GitHub creates phantom push-event run records (0 jobs, failure conclusion) — not actual executions that consume AI credits, but still noisy and potentially risky.

Bug in the previous fix: The condition fromJSON(github.event.inputs.aw_context || '{}').event_type != 'push' is always true for direct push events because github.event.inputs is empty → fromJSON('{}').event_type = null → null != 'push' = true — the guard passes and the workflow proceeds. Additionally, placing needs.pre_activation in a top-level if caused the compiler to omit the push guard from the pre_activation job, leaving it ungated.

Fix applied (commit $(git log --oneline -1 HEAD | cut -d' ' -f1)):

• approach-validator.md: changed to if: github.event_name != 'push' — the compiler now correctly propagates this guard to both pre_activation and activation jobs
• daily-syntax-error-quality.md: changed to github.event_name != 'push' && fromJSON(github.event.inputs.aw_context || '{}').event_type != 'push' to block both direct push events and dispatched push context

The github.event_name check is the reliable gate — it's always populated regardless of whether inputs are present.

[github-actions]

🎉 This pull request is included in a new release.

Release: v0.83.5