If you have spent enough time around CI, you probably know the loop. Change one line in a workflow. Push. Wait for the runner. Watch the job fail for a reason that has nothing to do with the line you changed. Push again. A few rounds later, the real feature is tiny and your git history is mostly you arguing with YAML in public. wrkflw started because I wanted that whole loop to happen on my laptop instead of on GitHub's servers, and preferably without leaving a trail of embarrassing commits behind.

Two years and more edge cases than I expected later, it has turned into a Cargo workspace with sixteen crates. It validates and runs GitHub Actions workflows locally, has a TUI, a proper expression evaluator, four runtime modes, watch mode, secrets, artifacts, cache, reusable workflows, and even a GitLab pipeline parser because apparently I don't know how to leave a side project alone. This post is mostly my attempt to answer the questions people keep asking me: why not just use act, why Rust, and what part was actually hard?

making sure my codebase is properly agentic