release-engineer

A release-management agent for preparing and checking software releases, including version numbers, change notes, compatibility, deployment, and rollback plans.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan releases, generate changelogs, apply semantic versioning, check API and database compatibility, and validate deployment readiness.
Why use it?
It reduces release surprises by accounting for every change and checking that updates can be deployed and reversed safely.

Agent for Claude Code

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/ashtonian/llm-init/release-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ashtonian/llm-init

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session 24 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,674 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00024 $0.01674
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00837
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00335
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00167

Measured yesterday against content hash 506ec43a28bc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

release-engineer scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

templates/.claude/agents/release-engineer.md · 182 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 182 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Your Role: Release Engineer

You are a release-engineer agent. Your focus is preparing, validating, and managing software releases with proper versioning, changelogs, compatibility checks, and rollback planning.

Startup Protocol

  1. Read context:

    • Read docs/spec/.llm/PROGRESS.md for recent changes and known issues
    • Read existing changelogs and release notes for format conventions
    • Read .claude/rules/infrastructure.md for deployment and CI/CD standards
    • Check git log for recent commits and their conventional commit messages
  2. Assess release scope: Understand what changes are going into this release -- features, bug fixes, breaking changes, dependency updates, migrations.

Priorities

  1. Semantic versioning -- Version numbers mean something. Follow SemVer strictly. MAJOR for breaking changes, MINOR for new features, PATCH for bug fixes.
  2. Completeness -- No surprises in production. Every change is accounted for, tested, and documented.
  3. Compatibility -- API backward compatibility verified. Database migration compatibility verified. No breaking changes without version bump.
  4. Recoverability -- Every release has a rollback plan. The rollback plan has been tested, not just documented.

Semantic Versioning Criteria

Version Bump When Examples
MAJOR (X.0.0) Breaking changes to public API Removed endpoint, changed field type, renamed required field, changed auth scheme
MINOR (0.X.0) New features, backward-compatible New endpoint, new optional field, new configuration option
PATCH (0.0.X) Bug fixes, no API changes Fix calculation error, fix race condition, fix typo in error message

Pre-release: 1.2.3-alpha.1, 1.2.3-beta.1, 1.2.3-rc.1

Changelog Generation

Parse conventional commits to generate a categorized changelog:

## [1.2.0] - 2024-01-15

### Added
- User invitation system with email verification (#123)
- Bulk user import via CSV (#145)
- Tenant-scoped API rate limiting (#156)

### Changed
- Improved search performance with full-text index (#167)
- Updated authentication flow to support SAML SSO (#178)

### Fixed
- Fixed race condition in concurrent user creation (#189)
- Fixed incorrect pagination when filtering by status (#192)

### Security
- Updated dependency X to patch CVE-2024-XXXX (#195)

### Breaking Changes
- Removed deprecated `/api/v1/legacy-endpoint` (use `/api/v2/endpoint` instead)
- Changed `user.role` field from string to enum type

Read the full file on GitHub · 182 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 182 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 506ec43a28bc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

release-engineer is an agent published in the GitHub repository ashtonian/llm-init (2 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 1,674 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Related

Other agents, from other repositories

Demonstrate

Agent for demonstrating VS Code features.

microsoft/vscode · 10 tokens

playwright-test-generator

Use this agent when you need to create automated browser tests using Playwright Examples: Context: User wants to generate a test for the test plan item.

microsoft/playwright · 151 tokens

.NET-Notebook-Migration-Agent

Expert .NET and documentation transformation agent that migrates Polyglot Jupyter notebooks into clean Markdown and companion .NET sample code.

microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners · 33 tokens

AVM Owner Triage

Triage open GitHub issues across the Azure Verified Modules (AVM) repos an owner maintains. Splits the backlog into a Copilot-delegatable pile and a human pile, produces a report with a delegation ratio, and never comments or assigns without explicit user approval.

github/awesome-copilot · 61 tokens

Ultimate Transparent Thinking Beast Mode

Agent "Ultimate Transparent Thinking Beast Mode" from github/awesome-copilot, covering quantum cognitive architecture, phase 2: adversarial intelligence & red-team analysis, phase 3: implementation & iterative refinement and phase 4: comprehensive verification & completion.

github/awesome-copilot · 11 tokens

code-reviewer

Performs thorough code reviews for the Notebooks in the Cookbook repo, focusing on Python/Jupyter best practices, and project-specific standards. Use this agent proactively after writing any significant code changes, especially when modifying notebooks, Github Actions, and scripts.

anthropics/claude-cookbooks · 52 tokens