Manually Monitoring GitHub CI is a Pain

GitHub Actions debugging is tedious. Workflows run on different hardware, timing, and environments than your local machine. The traditional fix? Tools like act that simulate CI locally. But it never quite replicates GitHub perfectly, and CI/CD automation remains a time-consuming process that requires you to intermittently check in and fix workflow-specific bugs.

Use Claude Code to Monitor Your GitHub CI Workflows

Claude Code + the gh CLI changes everything. Instead of simulating CI, you can have this AI DevOps agent autonomously monitor your actual workflows—providing GitHub workflow monitoring, detecting failures, reading logs, making fixes, and re-running. It's a massive productivity booster.

The gh CLI Commands

With gh installed, Claude Code will automatically invoke GitHub CLI commands when prompted—whether it's viewing workflow status, watching runs in real-time, getting detailed logs, or re-running failed jobs.

Beyond monitoring workflows, you can also use gh to create pull requests, merge PRs, manage issues, and perform other repository operations—all through natural conversation with Claude Code.

The Prompt

Just tell Claude Code what you want in plain English:

"Check in on this PR's gh workflows every few minutes and debug; stop when they have completed successfully"

Claude Code detects failures, reads logs, identifies the issue, makes the fix, pushes the changes, and re-runs the workflow—all through natural conversation.

A Real Example

Here's a before and after from a recent PR on bleep-that-shit:

Before (Run #139 - Failed):

All jobs failed: Lint, Smoke Tests, and all 3 E2E test shards. Status: Failure in 1m 6s.

After (Run #140 - Success):

Successful CI run showing all jobs green

All jobs green, 5 artifacts generated. Status: Success in 2m 24s.

Conclusion

Stop babysitting CI. Let Claude Code do it.

Claude Code GitHub Actions Example - Step-by-step walkthrough of the gh commands Claude Code executes
CLI is All You Need - Why natural language + CLI tools beats custom tooling

Let Claude Code Babysit Your CI: AI DevOps for GitHub Actions