Changelog writer that reads your merged PRs

Dev toolWebweekendNext.jsGitHub APIClaude API

The idea

Every product team knows they should ship a changelog — it’s marketing, retention, and SEO — and almost every team’s changelog is months stale because writing it is nobody’s job. The raw material (merged PRs) already exists in perfect structure. This is one of the highest-leverage “LLM as translator between audiences” plays: dev-speak in, user-speak out, human approves.

Who pays

SaaS teams and indie hackers. $12/month is an easy expense, and the hosted changelog page with your branding is ongoing lock-in. Distribution cheat code: every free-tier public changelog links back to you.

MVP scope

  • GitHub OAuth, pick repo + range, fetch merged PRs
  • One well-designed drafting prompt with noise filtering
  • Edit screen, publish to hosted page + RSS, copy as markdown
  • Skip for v1: GitLab, auto-posting to Slack/X, screenshots, i18n
// Build prompt — paste into Cursor / Claude Code / Lovable / Bolt
Build ShipNotes: a tool that turns merged GitHub pull requests into a
polished, user-facing changelog.

Core flow: the user signs in with GitHub (OAuth app, read-only repo
scope), picks a repo and a date range (default: since last changelog).
The app fetches merged PRs via the GitHub API (title, body, labels,
linked issues), filters out noise (dependabot, chore-labeled, internal),
and sends the rest to the Claude API (model: claude-sonnet-5) to draft a
changelog: entries grouped under Added / Improved / Fixed, written for
end users (benefit-first, no internal jargon, no PR numbers in the prose),
with a one-paragraph "highlights" intro at the top.

The user gets an editing screen (the draft in a markdown editor with live
preview), can regenerate any single entry, then publishes to a hosted
changelog page at shipnotes.app/<project> with an RSS feed, or copies
markdown/HTML for their own site.

Stack: Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase (auth
session storage + published changelogs), Anthropic SDK server-side,
Octokit for GitHub. Prompt design matters: instruct the model to only
describe changes evidenced in the PRs, mark anything ambiguous with
[check this] for the human editor, and match the tone of an example
changelog you include in the prompt.

Free: 1 repo, public changelog with "powered by" badge. Pro $12/month:
private repos, custom domain, no badge, scheduled weekly drafts.

// More Dev tool ideas