I Love Detailed Releases. I Hate Doing Them.

So I Made an AI Do It For Me.

You know what's fun? Shipping code.

You know what's not fun? The 47-step release ceremony afterwards where you squint at a diff, pretend you remember what you changed three days ago, write release notes that say "misc fixes," bump a version number wrong, forget to build, upload the wrong artifact, and then lie to your team about it in Slack.

I got tired of it. So I built Rel-Ease — a terminal release manager powered by Backboard.io that reads your diff, proposes a SemVer bump, writes real release notes, and handles the build-and-publish dance. Python, Rust, Node — it detects your repo and adapts.

The trick: the AI drives the thinking, but every mutation runs through explicit CLI tools on your machine. It doesn't hallucinate that it published to PyPI. It actually publishes to PyPI. Revolutionary concept, I know.

The workflow is obscenely simple

pip install release-cli
export BACKBOARD_API_KEY=sk-...
rel-ease release .

That's it. It diffs, it thinks, it bumps, it notes, it commits, it builds, it ships. You approve or you don't.

Want a dry run? --dry-run. Want to steer it? --hint "minor bump, new API". Want to make sure your environment isn't cooked? rel-ease doctor .

Why this exists

Because I wanted release notes I could actually email to a human without shame. Because "bump version" shouldn't require 15 minutes of my finite life on this earth. Because every manual release is an invitation to be lazy, and I am absolutely going to accept that invitation every single time.

Rel-Ease is me outsourcing the discipline I refuse to have.

It's open source

Because suffering alone is stupid.

GitHub: chrisk60331/Rel-Ease
PyPI: release-cli

Go use it. Go break it. Go make your releases embarrassingly detailed for once.