A GitHub Action that does a real job in your repo

Level 2: two to three weeks, real architecture. Use with: automate-a-task, ship-on-github. Resume line when done: Built CI automation for {repo_name} — a GitHub Action that {job}, running on every push for {n} weeks

Brief

Pick something you do by hand in one of your existing repos every time you touch it: checking that the links in the README still work, regenerating a stats table from a data file, compressing images before commit, validating that a JSON file still parses. Build a GitHub Action that does it for you, on push or on a schedule. Actions minutes are free on public repos, so the whole project costs nothing. The point is a robot teammate for a repo you already care about, so the automation gets exercised by your real commits.

Personalize

• A repo you actually push to. The Action must live in a repo with ongoing commits, yours or one you maintain with friends. An Action in a dead repo never runs, so it never proves anything.
• A chore you have really done twice. Look at your last ten commits for the manual step you repeated. That step is the spec.
• Fail or fix, your choice. Decide whether the Action blocks bad pushes (a check that fails) or repairs them (a commit that fixes). Both are real; pick the one your chore needs.

Milestones

1. Do the chore by hand one more time and write down every step and how long it took. That is the baseline.
2. Script the chore so one local command does the whole thing. Run it against the repo's history to make sure it behaves on real past states, ugly ones included.
3. Wrap the script in a workflow file triggered manually (workflow_dispatch). Run it from the Actions tab and read the logs.
4. Switch the trigger to the real event: push, pull request, or cron, whichever matches the chore.
5. Make failure useful: when the Action fails, the log says exactly what is wrong and where, in your words.
6. If the Action writes changes back, scope its permissions to the minimum and make the bot commit clearly labeled as automated.
7. Break the repo on purpose (a dead link, an invalid JSON edit) and confirm the Action catches it.
8. Let it ride your normal commits for two weeks without manual runs.
9. README badge plus a short section: what the Action does and what the repo looked like before it existed.

Done means

• The Action has run on real pushes, unattended, for at least two weeks
• The Actions history shows both passes and at least one genuine catch or fix
• The manual chore is gone from your workflow
• Any tokens use the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN with minimal permissions; nothing secret is hardcoded
• A deliberate bad commit fails visibly with a readable message
• Automated commits, if any, are clearly labeled as coming from the Action