gen-release-notes

A tool for writing release notes from changes between a previous version tag and the current code. It follows Keep a Changelog, a common format that groups changes such as additions, fixes, and breaking changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect commits and pull requests since a release, categorize the changes, and produce validated release notes.
Why use it?
It checks that the starting tag exists and prevents unsupported pull-request numbers, tags, or links from being added to the changelog.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the beagle-core plugin — 19 skills shipped together

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 skills/existential-birds/beagle/gen-release-notes
Any agent
npx skills add existential-birds/beagle --skill gen-release-notes
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/existential-birds/beagle

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install beagle-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 19 skills.

Per session 14 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,940 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 $0.00014 $0.02940
Opus 5 $0.00007 $0.01470
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00588
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00294

Measured 3d ago against content hash 6bc64bf549f2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

gen-release-notes 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 3d ago.

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.

plugins/beagle-core/skills/gen-release-notes/SKILL.md · 276 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 276 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Release Notes Generator

Generate professional release notes following the Keep a Changelog standard.

Input: Previous tag (e.g., v0.0.1)

$ARGUMENTS

Analyze the changes thoroughly before generating release notes.

Gates

Do not invent tags, PR numbers, or links. Each row must pass before the work that depends on it.

When Pass condition (evidence) On fail
Before git log / git diff git tag -l "$PREV_TAG" prints exactly one line matching PREV_TAG Stop; report that the tag is missing—do not write changelog entries
Before categorizing git rev-parse "$PREV_TAG^{commit}" exits 0 Stop; fix PREV_TAG or repo checkout
If using gh pr list Command exits 0 and JSON is valid Fall back to commit subjects + merge-commit URLs only; do not fabricate PR numbers
After Step 5 footer edits Step 6 footer-gate exits 0 (both grep -q checks pass against the staged CHANGELOG.md) Re-run footer edits from Step 5, then re-run Step 6 until it exits 0

Step 1: Gather Changes

Run these commands to collect information about changes since the provided tag:

# Store the previous tag
PREV_TAG="$ARGUMENTS"

# Gate: tag must exist (output must be non-empty and match PREV_TAG)
git tag -l "$PREV_TAG"
# If the line above prints nothing, STOP — do not continue below.

# Get the repo URL for PR links
git remote get-url origin

# List commits since last tag
git log ${PREV_TAG}..HEAD --pretty=format:"%h %s" --no-merges

# Get detailed diff stats
git diff ${PREV_TAG}..HEAD --stat

# List changed files by directory
git diff ${PREV_TAG}..HEAD --name-only | sort | uniq

Also gather PR information:

# Get merged PRs since the tag (requires gh CLI)
gh pr list --state merged --search "merged:>=$(git log -1 --format=%ci $PREV_TAG | cut -d' ' -f1)" --json number,title,author,labels

Step 2: Analyze and Categorize

Categorize each change into exactly one of these groups (in this order):

Read the full file on GitHub · 276 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. 3d ago First seen · 276 lines · 14 tokens per session scan A 6bc64bf549f2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

gen-release-notes is a skill published in the GitHub repository existential-birds/beagle (79 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 14 tokens to every session and 2,940 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 2026-08-30.

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