Auto-drafting, out in the open
tl;dr: The releases page now shows you exactly what we'd draft next — and lets you tune it right there, live.
Automatic release notes used to happen somewhere you couldn't see. Now the releases page opens with a ghost draft: the unreleased changes tray, showing precisely what would get drafted if the cadence fired this second. Not a promise, not a description of a promise — the actual picks, computed by the same code that does the real run, so preview and reality can't drift apart.
The tray isn't read-only either. Expand the inline editor and you get four controls — autonomy mode, cadence, what it drafts from, and writing tone — with the stream re-sorting live as you fiddle. Move a classification out of scope and watch changes drop out of the draft in front of you. Nothing saves until you say so; cancel puts everything back. If the picks are close but not quite, Pick manually hands the whole selection straight to the editor with Drippa's choices pre-loaded.
The biggest simplification is the autonomy mode. Two toggles used to sit at opposite ends of a settings panel, and you had to do boolean arithmetic in your head to work out what would actually happen. Now it's one choice: Off, Draft for review, or Draft & publish. Picking Off doesn't quietly forget your publishing preference, and if auto-drafting is off you'll see an amber banner saying so — with the picks you're missing still visible and a one-click turn-on for admins. Silence was never a good status indicator.
Everything else moved to match. Cadence is a set of friendly presets instead of two knobs asking one question (custom values you'd already saved still work, and still render honestly). Truncated group lists got real Show all / Show less toggles rather than a dead-end "+7 more". The settings page shed its auto-drafting section and is now purely about your public site, with a back link and cleaner controls after a round of tidying. And one genuinely annoying bug is dead: choosing "Any day" for cadence used to silently revert to Friday on the next page load, because the save path was stripping the null that meant "any". It persists properly now — if you'd picked "Any day" before, save it once more and it'll stick.
The point of all this: you can decide whether to trust automated release notes by looking at what they'd produce, not by reading a settings form and hoping.
Go look at your releases page — there's probably a draft sitting there already. Tell us if its taste is questionable.