ShipSure vs writing your own GitHub Action
You can do most of this yourself with CI and a weekend, and open-source options exist. Here's when rolling your own is the right call — and the three places it stops being enough.
Just write the workflow if…
…you review every diff before merging, your agents don’t run unattended, and you already gate merges on CI. A workflow that runs your test suite and fails the build catches the majority of this. It costs nothing and you should set it up today whether or not you ever pay us. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
Where DIY stops working
1. A baseline captured after the fact isn’t a baseline
To know an agent broke something, you need to know what was already broken before it started. Capture that state from the working tree after the agent has been editing, and a test it just broke gets recorded as “already failing” — so the regression goes completely undetected. That’s the single most valuable thing a verifier does, silently defeated. It’s also a bug we shipped and had to fix, which is why we’re confident it’s easy to get wrong.
2. “Couldn’t run” is not “passed”
When a check fails to execute — missing binary, wrong runtime version, a tool that isn’t on the runner — a naive workflow goes either green or red, and both answers are lies. The honest answer is inconclusive: nothing was learned. Conflating “I couldn’t tell” with “fine” is how a team learns to ignore its own verifier inside a fortnight.
3. A task with no stated gate shouldn’t come back green
If the contract for a task specifies nothing real — just a title, or only inherited defaults — then “verified” is meaningless, and returning it is worse than returning nothing because it manufactures confidence. This took us longest and almost nobody implements it. A verifier that can’t say “your contract doesn’t actually define done” will happily approve anything.
Side by side
| DIY GitHub Action | ShipSure | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | From $19/mo |
| Runs your tests and build | Yes | Yes |
| Where it runs | CI runner — code leaves your machine | Locally; only evidence leaves |
| Pre-task baseline | You build it, and it's easy to get wrong | Stored and staleness-checked |
| Separates 'couldn't run' from 'failed' | Rarely | Yes |
| Scope and dependency policy | Hand-rolled per repo | Declared once |
| Rejects a contract that gates nothing | No | Yes |
| Agent-agnostic | Tied to your CI | Any agent, before you push |
Feedback before you merge versus after you push is most of the practical difference. CI tells you once the mistake is already in the branch.
What ShipSure won't do
It won’t stop an agent writing bad code, and it won’t judge whether the feature is what you actually wanted — a pass means the gates you declared held, nothing more. JavaScript and TypeScript adapters are the mature ones; other stacks run through a generic shell adapter today. If your workflow already catches everything you care about, keep it.