GitHub workflows aren't triggered

Published on Apr 26, 2025

Today I noticed one of my GitHub workflows wasn't triggered when I pushed new commits. I tried with a few AI tools to debug it (mainly OpenAI GPT-o4 and Cursor with Claude Sonnet 3.7) but they didn't help much.

One thing I've been noticing about the AI tools is that they'll update the code in question fairly quick but you'll realize those do not resolve the issue at all. If you don't pay enough attention, you'll end up wasting much more time than you should.

So I took a look at GitHub to see how long that workflow has been broken. And suddenly I noticed that it was actually working well on other branches just very recently, I then concluded it seems that when it's a feature branch (branch names like feature/branch), the workflow just entirely ignored.

This time Cursor gave me the correct solution that I shall use '**' so I can also trigger branch names that have a slash /. Which is actually documented in the official documentation.

This was the tiny victory that reminded me I'm still better than AI models (in some ways). My huamn eyes still can be of use as a software developer. What a good thing to learn in a sunny Saturday!