release

brooks-lint — Release

Target version comes from the user request (e.g. 1.4.0). If empty, ask the maintainer for the semver bump before doing anything.

Before accepting that version, read the backlog. Run npm run changelog:audit and look at what is actually unreleased — the bump is decided by the whole range, not by the change that prompted the release. If the range contains a feature or a new platform and the maintainer asked for a patch, stop and say so: v1.5.1 was published, then deleted and re-cut as v1.6.0 because twenty unreleased commits (including a new platform) had been swept into a patch.

Execute these steps in order. bump-version.mjs reads the version FROM package.json and does NOT touch the changelog — so the version edit and the CHANGELOG entry are manual; the script only fans the version out to the manifests and every version-bearing text file.

1. Set the source of truth. npm version <version> --no-git-tag-version (the --no-git-tag-version flag is required — plain npm version would create its own commit + tag and collide with the manual commit in step 5).

2. Propagate. npm run bump — writes the version into .claude-plugin/plugin.json, .claude-plugin/marketplace.json, .codex-plugin/plugin.json, gemini-extension.json, and every version-bearing text file discovered by scripts/version-refs.mjs (all six README badges and action uses: pins, the JSON-LD softwareVersion on the docs landing page, and docs/github-action-example.yml). Do not maintain a list here — the script's is authoritative.

3. Write the changelog. Add a new section at the top of CHANGELOG.md with categorized notes (Added / Fixed / Changed) summarizing the commits since the last release tag. The heading MUST be ## [<version>] - YYYY-MM-DD — npm run validate parses that exact shape and fails on a bare ## <version>. 3a. Audit the range — every commit, no sampling. Run:

   npm run changelog:audit
   

   It derives the range from the last release tag, applies the only three exemptions (the release bump, a merge commit whose branch commits are listed separately, and the star-history refresh — a bot commit touching only the chart's own two files) and prints the rest as a checklist. Walk it: each line gets an entry you just wrote, or a reason it needs none. Nothing else is exempt — internal hardening with no user-visible change earns an entry, and so does an outside contributor's maintainer-facing fix, which also earns an @handle credit. A Changelog: trailer on a commit is surfaced as a flag; that commit's entry is the one you are writing now.

   The script exits non-zero on the gap it can prove — a pull request in the range whose #N the section never cites. That same check runs inside npm run validate while a release is in progress, so it cannot be skipped, and validate prints one line whenever it stands down. The rest of the checklist is judgment and is not enforced. A green audit is not proof of a complete changelog: a bare #N anywhere in the section clears the gate, a rebase-merged PR leaves nothing to match, and anything staged into the release bump itself is never audited. See AGENTS.md's Release Process.

4. Validate. npm run validate — fails if any manifest, any version-bearing text file, or the CHANGELOG entry is out of sync. Fix and re-run until clean. Then npm test.

5. Commit & push. Stage everything npm run bump rewrote plus CHANGELOG.md — read git status rather than naming files, because the version-bearing set is discovered from disk and is more than one README; commit with a conventional message (chore(release): bump version to <version>); push to main (direct-to-main repo — no PR).

6. Tag & publish. Create the GitHub release: gh release create v<version> --title "v<version>" --notes "<changelog section>".

Report the released version and the GitHub release URL when done.