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How Buoylog Turns Merged GitHub PRs into Release Notes

A walkthrough of what actually happens between merging a PR and a published changelog entry — the categorization, the rewrite, and the review step in between.

Buoylog Team · August 27, 2026 · 6 min read

Most changelog tools stop at "connect your GitHub repo." What happens between a merged pull request and a line on your public changelog matters just as much, and it's usually left vague. Here's exactly what Buoylog does, in order.

1. A pull request merges

Nothing changes about how you work. You keep opening and merging PRs on GitHub exactly like you do today — no new commit conventions, no required PR template, no extra step in your workflow.

2. Claude reads the PR title and description

When a PR merges, Buoylog sends the title and description to Claude with one job: rewrite it as a single, plain-English sentence a non-technical end user would understand, and pick the best-fitting category out of six — New, Improved, Fixed, Security, Breaking, and Deprecated. See Categories & visibility for what each one means. A PR titled fix: null check in webhook handler becomes something a user would actually recognize as a fix, not a git log entry.

3. It lands as a draft, not a publish

The rewritten entry shows up on your dashboard as part of an unreleased draft — it does not go out to your changelog page, subscribers, or Slack/Discord until you publish it. This matters because AI categorization is good, not perfect. You can edit the title, change the category, or mark an entry internal-only before anyone else sees it.

See your first draft appear

Connect a repo and merge a PR — watch it turn into a reviewable draft release note automatically.

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4. You review, then publish (or schedule)

Once you're happy with the draft, you give it a version number and hit publish — or schedule it for a specific time. Publishing does three things at once: it goes live on your hosted changelog page, it emails confirmed subscribers, and it posts to any connected Slack/Discord webhook. See Getting started for the full setup flow.

Why this order matters

Full automation sounds appealing until an AI misreads a PR description and ships an embarrassing changelog entry with your name on it. Keeping a review step between "merged" and "public" is a deliberate trade-off: you give up a few seconds of your time in exchange for never publishing something you didn't actually read.