GitHub UI Tour

Story

Building-a-house world — same site and crew as every Phase 0 lesson.

You've spent Phase 0 learning each room of the house one by one. The build diary. The sample rooms out back. The approval desk. The job-ticket board. The automatic inspection rig. The lockbox. The rulebook gate. The sign-in logbook. The ID-badge office.

Now it's your last day on site before the big inspection. You're standing at the entrance, and someone hands you a site map — one page, every room labeled, every path drawn.

That's this lesson. No new rooms. Just the map so you never get lost again.

When an exam question says "the agent opened a ___ for review" or "where do you set up required approvals?" — you look at the map, and the answer is obvious.

The repo tabs — your site map

A repository "contains all of your code, your files, and each file's revision history." You can "discuss and manage your work within the repository."

Across the top of any repo on GitHub is a row of tabs. Those tabs are the site map. Each one below maps to the house-world spot you already know:

source: docs.github.com — About repositories · fetched 2026-05-28

Per-repo vs organization-wide — the split that trips people up

The Settings tab lives inside every repo. But some controls live one level higher — in the organization's settings, covering every repo under the org's roof. Getting these two confused is how people get exam questions wrong.

Per-repo (repo → Settings tab)

• Branch protection rules + rulesets — gate who can merge into this repo's branches (0.9)
• Repo-level secrets + environments — keys available to workflows in this repo only (0.8)
• Collaborators + repo roles — who has what access to this repo (0.11)

Organization-wide (org → Settings — not a repo tab)

• Audit log — records activity across all repos in the org (0.10)
• Org roles — member, owner, billing manager — apply across the whole org (0.11)
• Org secrets — secrets shared across all (or selected) repos in the org (0.8)

source: docs.github.com — About repositories · fetched 2026-05-28

Why this matters for GH-600

The exam describes a scenario involving an AI agent and asks which surface, setting, or control is involved. If you know the map, you pick the right answer immediately.

Check-in — three quick questions

Open-ended. Think first, then peek at the suggested answer.

1. You're reading an exam question: "A developer needs to see every action taken by the AI agent across all repositories in the last 30 days." Which GitHub surface does this point at — a repo tab, or something else? Where exactly?

   Suggested answer

   The organization's audit log — not any repo tab. The audit log lives in the organization's settings (one level above individual repos) and records activity across all repos. "Across all repositories" is the signal that it's org-level, not per-repo.

2. Someone says: "the agent just opened one — it's sitting there waiting for you to review it." Which tab do you go to, and what does that surface do in the house-world analogy?

   Suggested answer

   The Pull requests tab. In the house world, it's the approval desk — where the agent's proposed changes sit with before/after photos (the diff), waiting for automated checks and a human reviewer to sign off before anything joins the real house.

3. An org has 50 repos. A security rule needs to apply to all of them. Is that set inside one repo's Settings tab, or somewhere else? What's the general principle?

   Suggested answer

   Somewhere else — the organization's settings. The general principle: controls scoped to "this repo only" live in that repo's Settings tab. Controls scoped to "all repos in this org" live in the org-level Settings. Org-wide examples: audit log, org roles, org secrets.

Mentor marks this lesson verified after you compare answers and say "got it" in chat.