ai-changelog

GitHub Action that generates changelogs from your merged pull requests using AI. Runs when a release is published, reads all PRs since the last release, and produces a structured changelog.

on:
  release:
    types: [published]

jobs:
  changelog:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: ofershap/ai-changelog@v1
        with:
          api-key: ${{ secrets.OPENAI_API_KEY }}
          provider: openai
          model: gpt-4o-mini
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Supports OpenAI and Anthropic. Transforms raw PR titles and metadata into readable release notes. No SDK dependencies, just native fetch.

Demo built with remotion-readme-kit

Why

Writing changelogs is one of those tasks that everyone agrees is important but nobody wants to do. GitHub has built-in auto-generated release notes, but they're just a list of PR titles, which is barely better than git log. This action reads your merged PRs, sends them to an AI model, and gets back a properly categorized changelog with human-readable descriptions. It groups changes into Features, Bug Fixes, Breaking Changes, and whatever other categories you define. You can have it update the GitHub Release body automatically, so publishing a release is all it takes to get a proper changelog.

Usage

Add the action to a workflow that runs on release: published:

name: Generate Changelog

on:
  release:
    types: [published]

jobs:
  changelog:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: ofershap/ai-changelog@v1
        with:
          api-key: ${{ secrets.OPENAI_API_KEY }}
          provider: openai
          model: gpt-4o-mini
          categories: "Features,Bug Fixes,Breaking Changes,Other"
          update-release: "true"
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Inputs

| Input | Required | Default | Description | | ---------------- | -------- | ------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------- | | provider | No | openai | AI provider: openai or anthropic | | model | No | gpt-4o-mini | Model to use (e.g. gpt-4o, claude-3-haiku) | | api-key | Yes | | API key for the AI provider | | categories | No | Features,Bug Fixes,Breaking Changes,Other | Comma-separated changelog categories | | update-release | No | true | Update the GitHub Release body with the changelog |

Outputs

| Output | Description | | ----------- | ---------------------------- | | changelog | The generated changelog text |

How It Works

1. Runs when a new GitHub Release is published.
2. Uses the GitHub API to list merged PRs since the previous release.
3. Builds a text summary of PR numbers, titles, authors, and labels.
4. Sends the summary to OpenAI or Anthropic with a changelog system prompt.
5. Optionally writes the generated changelog to the release body.

Supported Providers

| Provider | Models (examples) | API Key Secret | | ------------- | ------------------------------------ | ------------------- | | OpenAI | gpt-4o-mini, gpt-4o, gpt-4 | OPENAI_API_KEY | | Anthropic | claude-3-haiku, claude-3-sonnet | ANTHROPIC_API_KEY |

Example Output

## Features

- Added dark mode support for the dashboard (#42)
- New `--dry-run` flag for migrations (#38)

## Bug Fixes

- Fixed memory leak in WebSocket handler (#41)
- Resolved timezone handling for scheduled tasks (#39)

## Other

- Updated dependencies (#40)

AI DevOps Suite

Part of the AI DevOps suite:

• ai-commit-msg: AI-generated conventional commit messages
• ai-pr-reviewer: AI-powered PR review comments
• ai-label-pr: Auto-label PRs by size and type
• ai-changelog: AI-generated changelogs from merged PRs (this project)

Development

npm install
npm run typecheck
npm run build
npm test
npm run lint

Author

Ofer Shapira

License

MIT © Ofer Shapira