cut-release

A release-preparation workflow for the Microsoft APM project. It reviews changes since the last version tag, chooses a patch or minor version under semantic versioning, updates the changelog, checks the result, and opens a release pull request.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when preparing a release or opening a release pull request. It helps turn merged pull requests into dated changelog entries, apply versioning rules, and stop before tagging so a person can approve that final step.
Why use it?
It removes the need to manually judge the version change, rewrite unreleased notes, and coordinate the checks needed before a release pull request.

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/microsoft/apm/cut-release
Any agent
npx skills add microsoft/apm --skill cut-release
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/apm

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 198 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,578 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 $0.00198 $0.02578
Opus 5 $0.00099 $0.01289
Sonnet 5 $0.00040 $0.00516
Haiku 4.5 $0.00020 $0.00258

Measured 2d ago against content hash 07c15054e546, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cut-release 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/bump-version.sh, scripts/list-changes-since-tag.sh, scripts/verify-lint-mirror.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/cut-release/SKILL.md · 254 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 254 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

cut-release -- assess, sanitize, bump, lint, open PR

This skill drives the release-cut workflow end-to-end on the current worktree. It STOPS at "PR open"; tagging is the human-gated trigger that fires the release workflow.

When to use

Trigger this skill on any of these intents:

  • "cut a release"
  • "ship v0.x" / "ship the release"
  • "release prep" / "prepare the release"
  • "bump and open the PR"
  • "open the release PR"
  • "what kind of release do we need now"
  • "we have enough merged for a release"
  • Any phrasing that ends in opening a release PR.

Do NOT trigger on:

  • "tag v0.16.0" -- tagging is the post-merge step the operator runs.
  • "publish a blog post" / "draft release notes for the website".
  • "what changed since v0.15.0" -- enumeration only, no release.
  • "regenerate uv.lock" / raw version-string edits.
  • "rollback to v0.15.0" -- release reversal is a different skill.

Companion primitives

The skill DEPENDS on these existing primitives in the same source tree. Do not duplicate their content; reference them.

  • .apm/skills/apm-strategy/SKILL.md -- versioning judgement and breaking-change lens. Auto-loads via its own trigger on CHANGELOG.md and release-pipeline edits. Treat it as the authoritative lens for "is this BREAKING" and "does this positioning change warrant a migration note".
  • .apm/instructions/linting.instructions.md -- canonical CI-mirror lint chain. Reference; do not re-derive ruff / pylint command lists in this skill.
  • .github/instructions/changelog.instructions.md -- Keep-a- Changelog format contract. Reference; do not redefine the format.

Output charset rule

Per .github/instructions/encoding.instructions.md, source files in this bundle (SKILL.md, assets, scripts) MUST stay in printable ASCII. The PR body and changelog entries this skill produces are also written to repo files (CHANGELOG.md, PR body), so they MUST stay ASCII too. Use -- for em dashes, [!] / [+] / [x] for status markers, and so on.

Read the full file on GitHub · 254 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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 · 254 lines · 198 tokens per session scan A 07c15054e546

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cut-release is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/apm (3,687 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 198 tokens to every session and 2,578 once invoked, about $0.0010 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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