Re:Briefly – A CLI that turns Git commits into changelogs an...
by jmscarpax on Friday August 22, 2025 @08:45PM
(#44991803)
My team and I used to share weekly changelogs manually:
backend, frontend, and design updates written into a team channel.
It was useful for keeping everyone aligned, but it took effort to
turn commit-level work into something product/design could follow.
Since we were already experimenting with AI, we decided to automate it.
The result is *Briefly* – a lightweight CLI that:
- Collects commits from your repo
- Summarizes them with OpenAI
- Outputs a clean `briefly-summary.md`
- Publishes directly to Discord via webhook
The workflow is simple:
briefly setup
briefly generate
briefly publish
Since we were already experimenting with AI, we decided to automate it. The result is *Briefly* – a lightweight CLI that:
- Collects commits from your repo - Summarizes them with OpenAI - Outputs a clean `briefly-summary.md` - Publishes directly to Discord via webhook
The workflow is simple: briefly setup briefly generate briefly publish
It’s available on npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@jmscarpa/briefly
Roadmap includes: aliases (`briefly g`), multilingual summaries, relative dates (`--since 7d|1w|2m`), dry-run for CI, and custom prompts.
We’ve been using it internally and it’s saving us ~30 minutes per week while producing more consistent updates.
Would love feedback from the community — especially around CI integration ideas or formats beyond Discord.