release-notes-narrative

A release-note writing workflow for GitHub software releases, where GitHub is a service for storing code and tracking changes. It expands short automated change lists using commit details and pull-request descriptions, and fixes incorrect issue links.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after a semantic-release publication, where semantic-release is a tool that creates releases automatically, or to improve older release notes.
Why use it?
It makes automatically generated release notes more useful to readers and prevents misleading or broken links caused by poorly parsed text.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/marcusrbrown/systematic/release-notes-narrative
Any agent
npx skills add marcusrbrown/systematic --skill release-notes-narrative
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/marcusrbrown/systematic

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,561 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 $0.00051 $0.03561
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01781
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00712
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00356

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7cf66b1a8d08, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

release-notes-narrative 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 2d 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.

.agents/skills/release-notes-narrative/SKILL.md · 287 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 287 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Release Notes Narrative

CI Automation

This skill also runs automatically post-publish via @semantic-release/exec's successCmd in .releaserc.yaml. The hook dispatches fro-bot.yaml with a prompt that loads this skill and applies the 13-step procedure against the just-published tag. Manual invocation remains the canonical path for retroactive patches and historical releases; CI automation handles forward-going releases without operator intervention.

If you are reading this as the dispatched Fro Bot run, the prompt embedded the target tag and a correlation token. Echo the correlation token as your first log line, then proceed with the procedure below.

Overview

@semantic-release/release-notes-generator with the conventionalcommits preset builds release bodies from commit subject lines only — commit bodies and PR descriptions are never ingested. The result is mechanically correct but qualitatively thin: a bucket of one-line bullets that tells readers what changed but not why it matters. The same generator also misparses any path#fragment substring in a commit body as a Closes #N footer, emitting broken autolinks pointing at nonexistent issues.

This skill replaces the auto-generated body with AI-assisted narrative drawn from the commit log and, when the commit body is thin, from the PR description. It applies the patch via gh release edit --notes-file against an already-published release.

Core principle: The commit log is the authoritative source. Every claim in the rendered body must trace to a commit SHA, commit body, or PR description in the range. Do not invent context.

Overwrite behavior: This procedure always overwrites the existing release body unconditionally. If the release body contains manually-authored regions, those regions are replaced. Capture the pre-edit snapshot (procedure step 3) before running so you can restore it if needed.

When to Use

  • A published release body contains only terse auto-generated bullets (* **ci:** add OpenCode group name to Renovate config (#425)) with no explanatory prose
  • A published release body contains a spurious closes [URL-fragment] autolink (e.g., closes [fro.bot/.../typed-validation](https://github.com/fro.bot/systematic/reference/configuration/issues/typed-validation)) generated by semantic-release misparse
  • You want to retroactively improve the narrative quality of a historical release (e.g., v2.20.5, v2.20.6)

Read the full file on GitHub · 287 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 2d ago First seen · 287 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A 7cf66b1a8d08

Subscribe to this mod's changes

release-notes-narrative is a skill published in the GitHub repository marcusrbrown/systematic (24 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 3,561 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories