Release Notes That Write Themselves
tl;dr: Your release notes now draft themselves on a schedule you set, and you can watch them being written in real time.
Writing release notes is the tax you pay for shipping. We just paid it for you. Automatic release note generation is here: pick a cadence, and drafts appear on their own from the work you've actually merged — no GitHub release tags required, because most teams treat merge as release and we designed for that. The drafts stay small and purposeful. A big backlog gets split into a few tight notes grouped by when things landed, instead of one 40-bullet monolith nobody reads. Dependency bumps and docs churn are filtered out by default.
Everything lives on the new Release Settings page. Cadence in days, a specific weekday or any day, a minimum-changes threshold so you don't publish a note about one typo fix, and a writing tone — professional, changelog, warm, or the one you're reading right now. Flip on auto-publish if you trust it, or keep every draft behind a review click. Public site settings moved here too, so release configuration is finally in one place instead of two.
Don't want to wait for Friday? Generate now drafts immediately. It used to hold your browser hostage on a long request; now it queues durable background work that survives deploys and retries itself, while the releases page shows what's happening — "drafting release notes from 12 changes merged Jul 3–17" — and stops polling the moment the work is done. Double-click it all you like: the guards re-run at execution, so you get one draft, not four. If drafting isn't possible, you're told why in plain English ("a draft is already waiting for review", "not enough changes yet") instead of a shrug.
One fix deserves a mention because it was ugly. A background cleanup process that tidies up abandoned drafts was measuring staleness by creation date — which made any published note being edited look ancient the second the edit began, and eligible for deletion. Published notes are now excluded from cleanup entirely, staleness keys on last activity, and an edit that crashes mid-flight gets restored to its previous good state rather than removed. Your published content stays published. Full stop.
For the agent crowd: five tools expose all of this over MCP — list notes, read one, publish, generate on demand, and configure auto settings — behind a dedicated write scope. Your changelog can now be someone else's job, and that someone doesn't need coffee.
Set your cadence once, then go back to shipping. The notes will catch up on their own.