In this talk, the speaker describes how their team replaced a manual, browser‑based copy‑paste workflow for biweekly release notes with an automated solution built around Claude AI (including Claude Code), the GitHub API, and Notion’s official connector. They explain the motivation—limited LLM access to code and the tedious cross‑referencing of release pages and Notion documents—and how Claude’s direct repository access enables accurate extraction of PR and release data. The implementation involves a scheduled (currently manual) task that uses a personal access token stored in an environment variable, calls the GitHub API to gather release candidate (RC) information, and generates a structured guideline that can be followed by designers or non‑technical staff. The Notion connector allows Claude to write directly to a Notion page, automatically updating release notes as new RCs appear. The speaker highlights the workflow’s benefits: significant time savings, reduced manual errors, and delivering up‑to‑date release information to a broad audience—including executives, product leadership, and customer service—who need concise, reliable updates without digging into raw release data.
Chapters
any sort of automations that you've built for yourself with any of the tooling to kind of like, I don't know, speed some things up here and there? Yeah, we have biweekly release notes and at first we started exploring generating those with our browser. So via Chat with their AI, uh, or some other folks might be using Chrome with, with Gemini and we have our releases page and then a Notion doc that we essentially dumped the release notes into and we would cross-reference those. And it worked pretty well, but again, like the browser, you know, LLM is reading those. They don't have direct access to the code and, and the release notes with RSE. So as we started leaning into Claude more, I was exploring doing more of like an automated task. And obviously with Claude Code, it has direct access to the repo. It can see what's in the PRs and the releases. So, uh, I was really interested in seeing like how much more accurate it could be. I have that up if you want to take a look. I could quickly show. Yeah, not spend too much time, but yeah, this chat was like the first one where I was just seeing if it was entirely possible. So I was just asking Claude like, hey, I want to try out making this, you know, recurring task. Can you walk me through it? I want to automate it and essentially getting some background in terms of what's possible. So I don't have to go and hop through Claude docs. And then I was like, oh, you know, in the end, oh, there's this scheduled task and essentially a routine walking through Claude, seeing what types of routines we could make, etc., etc. And then, you know, we have connectors as well. So like I said, we use Notion. So they have an official Notion connector. So now that's already a level up from the browser, just reading sort of a, a read-only view of the Notion. It could also write with this connector, uh, versus the browser, it was like a copy paste. Yeah. So I had that. We're obviously connected to GitHub. So in the end, now I have this scheduled task. It generates, you know, essentially a guideline with a bunch of steps using the GitHub API directly. So I can point it to the release. You do have to use a personal access token, um, and at first it was like, no, don't give me the actual one because you don't want to expose your actual access token to Claude. So you make an environment variable. That's probably the most technical thing it did. And, um, few other steps, and then in the end I had it actually generate a guideline that other designers or even more non-technical folks can follow. So it's very approachable and anyone can try it. And a few other things around like output in terms of sections, ordering, et cetera. And then at that point, right now it's not scheduled. It's just manual. So I choose when to launch it in case we have like an odd week or something. And then that way, not only is it fetching the latest and the the actual source, which is our RCs from our release page. And the RCs, we have a few RCs leading up to sort of that actual release day. So that page will change. So, you know, the next week I could say, hey, let's check if there was another RC, see what's missing, let's update the Notion. And now I don't have to go and copy paste and cross-reference between windows what's in Notion. It just knows and it Edits the Notion for me. So we've only done this a couple times, but it's been a huge time saver. And yeah, in the end, the release notes end up in customers' hands as well. So it's not just for our own team and stakeholders to know, you know, what's coming out. 'Cause folks like CEO, et cetera, and even our chief product officer, they're not constantly looking at releases, right? They're worried more about bigger picture stuff. So it's nice for them to, to just have that, that list, including our like customer service people too. Yeah.
