Token optimization: scope glossary-maintainer toolsets and pre-fetch git history

[Copilot]

The Glossary Maintainer was consuming 3.8M tokens/run, with search_repositories accounting for 342 of 588 total tool calls (58%) — a global GitHub search tool that's irrelevant to a local glossary update task. issue_read added another 232 unnecessary calls.

Changes

• Scoped GitHub toolsets: [default] → [repos, pull_requests], eliminating search_repositories from the available tool surface
• Removed issues: read permission: glossary maintenance has no need for issue data
• Full checkout with complete git history: added checkout: fetch-depth: 0 so git log --since in the pre-step can traverse the full commit history rather than the default shallow clone
• Added pre-execution bash step: runs git log before the agent starts, writing commit history and doc-touching commits to /tmp/gh-aw/agent/ files the agent reads directly — eliminates ~45 data-gathering API turns
• Updated prompt instructions: "Determine Scan Scope" now reads pre-fetched files; "Scan Recent Changes" caps API calls to 20 commits and 10 PRs
• Added ## Constraints section to the prompt: explicit hard limits on search_repositories, issue reading, commit/PR counts, and repository scope

checkout:
  fetch-depth: 0  # full history required so git log --since works across all commits

tools:
  github:
    toolsets: [repos, pull_requests]  # scoped to avoid search_repositories (in default)

# Pre-step: agent reads these instead of making API calls
git log --since="$SINCE" --oneline --name-only > /tmp/gh-aw/agent/recent-commits.txt
git log --since="$SINCE" --name-only --format="%H %s" -- 'docs/**/*.md' 'docs/**/*.mdx' > /tmp/gh-aw/agent/doc-changes.txt

[pelikhan]

@copilot use the checkout feature to get a non-sparse checkout of the repo

[Copilot]

Added checkout: fetch-depth: 0 to the frontmatter in 4e0511b. This configures a full (non-sparse) checkout with complete git history, ensuring git log --since='24 hours ago' and --since='7 days ago' in the pre-step can see all commits rather than just the shallow single-commit default.

[g66b166-hub]

#23758