Show HN: Release The Notes – AI-generated release notes from your Git commits

Hi HN,

I’m Steffen (ex-iOS tech lead at TIDAL, now indie dev). I got tired of squinting at git logs and that blank App Store text-area every release, so I built Release The Notes! – a macOS app that turns the diffs between any two refs into copy-ready release notes.

What it does

- Pick a repo & refs – any local Git repo; tags, branches or SHAs.

- Noise filter – resources / test snapshots / config churn are ignored.

- AI summary – OpenAI chews on the remaining diffs and returns two drafts:

- End-user friendly (“What’s New”)

- Stakeholder / technical (“Internal changelog”) with contributor info

- One-click variations – concise, humorous, extra-technical, marketing-ish.

- Copy to clipboard – paste straight into App Store Connect, GitHub Releases, email, etc.

Under the hood

SwiftUI + The Composable Architecture, macOS 14+. Apple Silicon-native (Intel still works).

Only the diffs/metadata you choose are sent to OpenAI over HTTPS; nothing is stored server-side. Analysis of ~50 commits ≈ 30 s; thousand-commit ranges take a couple of minutes. Caches the analysis locally, so generating extra tones is instant.

Pricing

Free download → $4.99 / month or $19.99 / year (3-day trial on yearly). Rationale: cheaper than the hour I used to burn writing notes by hand.

Links

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/release-the-notes/id6743372709 Website (screens, video): https://releasethenotes.com/

Why I’m posting

I’d love feedback on:

- Accuracy/trustworthiness of the AI summaries

- UX (especially first-run flow)

- Fairness of the price point

- Edge-cases you hit (huge repos, mono-repos, unconventional commit styles, etc.)

Roadmap

- Markdown / HTML / JSON export templates

- Jira links

- Self-hosted-LLM options

- Localization (is non-english release notes a thing?)

Happy to answer anything. Tear it apart!

Steffen