Claude Code does our releases now

68 aluxian 78 5/26/2025, 3:22:14 AM aluxian.com ↗

Comments (78)

SCdF · 1d ago
Is this not a bash script, but run through a "maybe it won't work this time" randomizer?

Sometimes I feel like I live on another planet. Wouldn't you at least get Claude to write the bash script, confirm it works how you like, then run that? Why get an LLM to guess how to do it each and every time?

At least they are still manually approving, which the title made sound like something they'd move on from.

alanfranz · 1d ago
We're moving fast from "we do this with AI because it's useful" to "we do this with AI because it's cool despite the fact that it's slower, more expensive, and non-deterministic"

It's like the "we made over our product in order to use technology X because it's cool and modern" that we've seen multiple times with node, go, rust, k8s, blockchain, <enter technology here>.

NekkoDroid · 1d ago
> non-deterministic

Counterpoint: temperature = 0 /s

On a more serious note: I personally only found LLMs really interesting to double check my code if there might be something I overlooked in the general implementation (a different approach or so), never really for it to write code directly for me. I feel like this is just becoming less and less common nowadays and it kinda makes me worry for the quality of code that was already questionable at times...

mchonedev · 15h ago
I know you used the /s but it's quite common that 0 temperature is believed to be deterministic. For others coming across this thread, it's not deterministic, it is simply less likely to return different tokens (it still absolutely will)
lostmsu · 9h ago
AFAIK it shouldn't.
tarsinge · 23h ago
You are not the target. This is marketing content for their tool, aimed at semi technical people with buying power but not actual developers.
alanfranz · 21h ago
Oh, it is now flagged. I admit I didn't notice that was marketing content, I thought it was a genuine blogpost.
blahgeek · 1d ago
And the bash script would be shorter and easier to write than the prompt.
danw1979 · 1d ago
This is a fine example of a process you really want to be deterministic being automated using something that is definitely not.
M4v3R · 1d ago
I did something similar in my hobby project - the agent was promoted, among the other things, to copy a signature from a build artifact into a json file. It worked fine until it didn’t - one day Claude 4 Sonnet randomly flipped one letter in the signature to something else. It wasn’t the end of the world, I catched the error because I always manually test if the release worked, but it shows that AI tools should not be used as execution engines for CI/CD workflows. It’s slow, inefficient and error prone. Just ask the AI to help you write a proper workflow with code.
littlestymaar · 1d ago
> It’s slow, inefficient and error prone.

And really expensive, which is why AI companies want you to do that.

> Just ask the AI to help you write a proper workflow with code.

This.

CoolCold · 1d ago
I'm with you here and likely the next step would be yelling to to Cloud - basically the same and as we see how widespread Clouds are
wg0 · 1d ago
Thanks for pointing out something which by some is considered unpopular. Use AI tools all you want but wherever you want deterministic outcome - current generation isn't up to that level.

We must acknowledge, understand and work around a technology's limitations.

shermantanktop · 1d ago
What is the deterministic alternative you suggest?

I’m not endorsing this release practice in particular, it scares me. But I have been involved in a lot of automation projects where perfection was the initial goal, and then abandoned because it was obvious that non-automated work was so imperfect. Human error is a fact of life.

ygouzerh · 1d ago
I am a DevOps Engineer, all the thing that he described in the prompt can be just done by Github Actions except the summary of the PR.

I don't condemn using LLM, but at least they could have use it in order to write better Github Actions instead.

forty · 1d ago
If you really have to use an IA, at least use it to generate code once and use that. This way it's deterministic and you get a chance to understand what happens and to debug issues.

Not sure why IA could create something you couldn't however. And at least understanding what happens if part of the bundle.

forkerenok · 1d ago
The sibling comment from M4v3R covered this well.
shermantanktop · 17h ago
Did it? I didn’t see a claim that doing this work manually had a zero error rate.

Again, I would probably not do this. But let’s not pretend that non-AI release processes prevent all issues. We’re really talking different kinds of errors, and the ai driven ones tend to be obviously wrong. At least right now.

danw1979 · 49m ago
What I didn’t say was that “all devops release pipelines that use traditional scripted approaches are error free”.
geuis · 1d ago
We have a very small team and release at will. Some days multiple times, sometimes days between.

We don't use AI, just have a well tested codebase and basic bash script automation mixed in with GitHub actions.

Not bashing AI tools in particular, but just learning some basic decades old tooling and processes gets you pretty much all of the way there.

beAbU · 1d ago
I tell my teams and stakeholders that releasing software is like exercising a muscle. It more it's automated, and the more frequently we do it, the less of a "thing" it becomes. Releasing should not be reserved for a single senior dev: any dev in the team should be able to release at any time, and the system should be set up with the appropriate guard rails to avoid stupid mistakes. Rollbacks should be trivial and everyone should know how to do it.
mkl95 · 1d ago
> less manual work is always better.

Why do your releases involve non negligible manual work?

> We release 1-3 times per week.

If I were a customer, I would be concerned by this statement. Having an amateurish deployment strategy is one thing, but your release cadence implies low confidence and quality issues.

politelemon · 1d ago
The cadence of releases is not related to quality. There will always be variances depending on the codebase involved and organisational constraints and product velocities. I could easily say that more frequent or less frequent releases are also a cause for concern.
mkl95 · 1d ago
We are talking about a Gen AI startup that has a handful of employees here. They have little excuse not to implement CI/CD, unless they lack confidence in their product's quality.
Mashimo · 1d ago
Ignoring the Claude AI release, why does releasing 1 - 3 per week implies low confidence and quality issues?
friendzis · 23h ago
It means you release whatever you have first thing and then release a bunch of patch releases on top as the QA (outsourced on users, probably) results come back.

Sans security patches, why are your features not sized to roughly a sprint? What do you manage to prepare, build and validate in a day or two? To me release cadence less than every few weeks screams "whatever landed in master is good to go" and is a sign of mis-/un-managed development.

Mashimo · 23h ago
Maybe they don't do sprints.

Yeah, could be user feedback. And if it's a public beta release why not?

3 devs working for 5 days on each their feature means 3 releases per week.

For the last 10+ years I have been working on the same project with 2 releases per year, so what do I know. But I have used projects with quick release cycles that work very closely with the community. Push new beta, feedback on discord. Was also fine from my (limited) perspective.

DonHopkins · 1d ago
Because they should be spending one day writing scripts and github actions for their CI/CD system before pushing out new code by hand or AI assistance several times a week.

Releasing 1 - 3 times a week means it's 1 - 3 times more important to have a deterministic release process than if you release 1 time a week.

Mashimo · 1d ago
Yes yes, I agree with a deterministic release process. I get that, and it's not what I'm asking about.

I still don't understand why 1 - 3 releases per week implies low confidence and quality issues.

apwell23 · 1d ago
> but your release cadence implies low confidence and quality issues.

curious why would it imply that.

mkl95 · 1d ago
Why would a startup CTO choose to deploy a couple of times a week with a Claude script instead of implementing basic CI/CD? He makes it sound like he's running a clusterfuck and he isn't qualified for the job.
9dev · 1d ago
Aren't you assuming a bit much here? They have implemented CI/CD; their Claude script triggers the git branch part of the release flow, which is what in turn triggers the CI/CD pipeline—a completely normal thing to do, even in established teams (save for the Claude part).

The guy automated the toil away using AI. Not that I would feel confident automating away that part in particular, but it does neither speak badly of the code quality, nor his job qualifications.

DonHopkins · 1d ago
Because there is more toil in writing a blog post about how you use AI to do a release, than there is in writing a script that makes the AI and the blog post unnecessary.

But then you wouldn't have something about using AI to blog about.

9dev · 1d ago
That’s an entirely different issue: people maintain a blog to improve their hireability, and that entails blogging about things that may not always be brilliant insights. It’s not this person's fault that that’s the state of tech hiring however. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
AStonesThrow · 1d ago
Blogging is actually a good way for professionals to earn CEUs to maintain certifications.

Chances are, if you’re reading low-effort blog posts that are consistently in certain knowledge domains, they’re intending to apply for CEUs at renewal time.

rbinv · 20h ago
I had no idea people could earn Continuing Education Units for blogging, but it's true: https://www.comptia.org/continuing-education/choose/renewing...
DonHopkins · 23h ago
Well looks like he had the last laugh on us: GitHub was down, so nobody with CI/CD GitHub Action deployment scripts could make a release unless they used AI or did it by hand!

https://www.githubstatus.com/

Update - Packages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate. May 26, 2025 - 08:39 UTC

Update - Copilot is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate. May 26, 2025 - 08:26 UTC

Update - Actions is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate. May 26, 2025 - 08:25 UTC

Update - We are continuing to investigate degraded performance. May 26, 2025 - 07:53 UTC

Update - Issues is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate. May 26, 2025 - 07:35 UTC

Investigating - We are investigating reports of degraded performance for API Requests and Git Operations May 26, 2025 - 07:21 UTC

maeln · 1d ago
It really depends on the product. Especially if 0-downtime deployment is not possible.
wmichelin · 1d ago
why not have CI?
Mashimo · 1d ago
But the questions was about the cadence and not the method.
Jean-Papoulos · 1d ago
Is this a psyop to check how HN readers will react to this insanity ? This could be a simple script. It should be a simple script. Please update us when this fails :)
apwell23 · 1d ago
psyop is working. i am seriously considering quitting my 2 decade coding career that I very much loved before this AI insanity. We have mandate at work that all code must now be generated by AI in first iteration.

I am going to open a Montessori school in India with my wife.

beAbU · 1d ago
The author of this article is using AI to run certain console commands, while still requiring them to manually advance the release process.

Almost as if the author does not know how to write a bash script, and reverted to using an AI prompt in stead?

sriku · 1d ago
I just spent a day resurrecting an old iOS music app of mine that got kicked out of the app store because I didn't make time to keep up with changes and devices, and some music students kept asking "when is it going to get back on the app store?".

I used Claude Code in "do whatever you need to to modernize this code" mode for a bit and then went about correcting the things it got wrong. Many changes made were mechanical and useful and a few incorrect. It botched up some core code big time with changes that didn't make any sense, and I had to revert and micromanage changes to that. In all, it was a win for a day's work during the weekend.

Approx $30 well spent, but I give my thanks to the OSS community whose code made Claude Code possible and wish I could've split that with them.

The fact that software systems are architected with tons of mini languages means LLMs can be of use to select from the space of possibilities without me having to learn incidental details I don't want to spend time or my neurons on.

mpweiher · 1d ago
Fortunately I wasn't in the market for an AI shopping assistant anyhow, but still thanks for letting me know what to avoid if I ever became interested in one.
sudhirj · 1d ago
Please ask the agent to help write a workflow script (GitHub Actions yaml or makefile or similar) instead of using it as a runner - if you do that the release pipeline changes with each execution. You do not want a non deterministic release pipeline that's mostly correct. You want one that's checked in to version control and always does exactly the same thing, with all logs and artefacts recorded.

By all means use whatever AI agent you have to help set that up.

eCa · 1d ago
> So please

No one has ever said ”please” to me in release instructions. Not that I miss it, I would find it weird.

kissgyorgy · 1d ago
It's a well known prompt trick to get better results. Scott Hanselman explained it like "You get to the nice corner of the internet."
DonHopkins · 1d ago
But what if the LLM senses you're using the word "please" in the passive aggressive, patronizing, ironic sense? ;)
AStonesThrow · 18h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

[The keyword "PLEASE"] provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented.

wg0 · 1d ago
Speaking of which - I was wondering if there is a catalogue of release processes? Variety, usual steps, checklists?

Asking because development processes are a hot market themselves think of XP, Scrum, agile etc so wondering if there's something documented about release processes.

beAbU · 1d ago
RemindMe! 3 months from now.

Willing to put down a little bit of my money that this is going to blow up in their faces in the near future.

I'm not super technical at all, but I don't understand why a team that does 1-3 deploys a week is not fully automating with "proper" CI.

000ooo000 · 1d ago
>I don't understand why a team that does 1-3 deploys a week is not fully automating with "proper" CI.

They don't either apparently

zorked · 1d ago
Use AI to write a release script if you need. Don't do what this post suggests.
rubyn00bie · 1d ago
I’ll be honest this sounds like something that could be completely automated without AI. Wouldn’t a simple shell script accomplish this? Merge, push tag, deploy release with tag. I’m really not sure why AI is useful here at all but maybe I’m missing something?
zihotki · 1d ago
Using a script there won't make the news headline. It's an ad for their product - a chat bot
XenophileJKO · 1d ago
I think the only main "benefit" here is auto-documentation. I have for example been pretty impressed when doing coding with Claude Code of how it creates the git commits.

I've just been testing it out having it create a whole application by itself so I can understand how well it works and what its limiations are with Sonnet 4. So far it is pretty impressive but also limited in context retention/retrieval.

apwell23 · 1d ago
headline for being stupid?

i guess no such thing as bad publicity

hiyer · 1d ago
This is cool and all, but I don't see why this can't be accomplished (and more deterministically) with a bunch of bash/python scripts. I've seen that done and work well in several firms for decades.
kristopolous · 1d ago
Agreed. This prompt is very easy to satisfy with 1970s technology.
DonHopkins · 1d ago
JCL! My mom could do that. Fortunately she's safely and blissfully retired, so AI can't take her jerbs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Control_Language

>"the worst computer programming language ever devised by anybody, anywhere" -Fred Brooks

(Obviously when he said that, Fred hadn't been exposed to bash yet!)

"Please write a JCL script to orchestrate the release of my AI startup company's AI powered shop assistant from github. Did I mention that we use AI?"

    //*********************************************************************
    //*  M O L I N A I   R E L E A S E   P I P E L I N E                  *
    //*                                                                   *
    //*  Product  : AVATAR-SHOP-ASSISTANT                                 *
    //*  Company  : Aluxian / Molin AI                                    *
    //*  Purpose  : Tag, publish and attach artefacts to GitHub           *
    //*********************************************************************
    //AVTREL  JOB (AC),'MOLIN AI',CLASS=A,MSGCLASS=X,JOBPARM=TIME=1440,TYPRUN=HOLD
    //         REGION=0M
    //SET PRJ=MOLINAI,APP=AVATAR,TAG=v3.1.0,TOK=ghp_FAKE,REPO=aluxian/avatar
    //SET WS=/opt/molin/ws
    //MUSE PROC GIT=/usr/lpp/git4z/bin/git4z,CURL=/usr/lpp/bear/bin/curlbear,SHA=
    //ENV  SET PATH=/usr/lpp/git4z/bin:/bin HOME=/home/molin
    //SHA  EXEC PGM=BPXBATCH,PARM='PGM &GIT rev-parse HEAD'
    //STDOUT DD DSN=&&S,UNIT=SYSDA,SPACE=(CYL,1),DISP=(,PASS)
    //IFTAG IF (&SHA ¬= ' ') THEN
    //TAG  EXEC PGM=BPXBATCH,PARM='PGM &GIT tag -a &TAG &SHA -m &TAG'
    // ELSE
    //TAG  EXEC PGM=BPXBATCH,PARM='PGM &GIT tag -a &TAG -m &TAG'
    // ENDIF
    //PUSH EXEC PGM=BPXBATCH,PARM='PGM &GIT push origin &TAG',COND=(4,LT)
    //JSON EXEC PGM=IEBGENER
    //SYSUT1 DD *
    {"tag_name":"&TAG","name":"Avatar &TAG","generate_release_notes":true}
    /*
    //SYSUT2 DD DISP=(NEW,CATLG),DSN=&&PAY(0),UNIT=SYSDA,SPACE=(TRK,1)
    //SYSIN  DD DUMMY
    //ESDS EXEC PGM=IDCAMS
    //SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
    //SYSIN DD *
    DEFINE CLUSTER(NAME(&&E) RECORDSIZE(255 255) KEYS(1 0) REUSE SPEED) -
      DATA(NAME(&&E.DATA))
    REPRO INFILE(P) OUTDATASET(&&E.DATA)
    IF MAXCC>4 THEN SET MAXCC=0
    /*
    //P DD DISP=SHR,DSN=&&PAY(0)
    //POST EXEC PGM=BPXBATCH,
    // PARM='PGM &CURL -sS -X POST https://api.github.com/repos/&REPO./releases
    //      -H Authorization:\ Bearer\ &TOK -H Accept:\ application/vnd.github+json
    //      --data-binary\ @DD:EJSON'
    //EJSON DD DISP=SHR,DSN=&&E.DATA
    //STDOUT DD DSN=&&R,UNIT=SYSDA,SPACE=(TRK,1),DISP=(,PASS)
    //RID EXEC PGM=IKJEFT01
    //SYSTSPRT DD DSN=&&ID,UNIT=SYSDA,SPACE=(TRK,1),DISP=(,PASS)
    //SYSTSIN DD *
      alloc fi(r) da('&&R') shr
      execio * diskr r (stem x. finis
      do i=1 to x.0
        if pos('"id"',x.i)>0 then parse var x.i '"id":' id ',' .
        if id¬='' then say strip(id); leave
      end
    /*
    //* BLDL fix — after the ‘Q3-FY24 LLA purge’ when an ill-advised UPDATE to
    //*   SYS1.LINKLIB nuked the BLDLRES chain, froze LLA, and threw half the
    //*   plex into S047s until Ops spent nine hours baby-sitting a cold-start IPL.
    //COPY EXEC PGM=IEBCOPY
    //SYSUT1 DD DISP=SHR,DSN=&&R
    //SYSUT2 DD DSN=&PRJ..G.&APP..R(&TAG),DISP=(NEW,CATLG),
    //             SPACE=(CYL,(1,1,1)),DSORG=PO
    //UPL EXEC PGM=BPXBATCH,
    // PARM='PGM &CURL -sS -X POST
    //      https://uploads.github.com/repos/&REPO./releases/$(cat &&ID)/assets?name=shop.jar
    //      -H Authorization:\ Bearer\ &TOK -H Content-Type:\ application/java-archive
    //      --data-binary\ @&WS/&APP/dist/shop.jar'
    //STDENV DD DUMMY
    //PEND
    //GO EXEC MUSE
coolgoose · 1d ago
I mean, it's cute, but how the heck this is this an actual solution.

This is basic automation and a pretty weird deployment process that could literally be a proper ci/cd pipeline.

retinaros · 1d ago
feels like we entering the ICO stage of GenAI
satisfice · 1d ago
Thank you for warning your potential customers.
apwell23 · 1d ago
> So please:

> 1. Check if there exists a release PR already. When you check, do not grep, just list ALL PRs.

Why would you make AI do this when you can just do it with an api call or git.

Does the author not know that there is a chance that it won't actuall list ALL PRs just because he put that in all caps?

we have lost our collective minds that this person is proudly publishing this stupidity to the world. i hate this so much.

can we pls ban these coders from the industry :(

miyuru · 1d ago
>can we pls ban these coders from the industry

This is the main problem with AI, we can no longer distinguish bad coders/managers because they use AI heavily and which can say knowledgeable things at times while having no idea on what they are doing.

I now say things that will not make sense to a good coders (like saying the steps out of order), to find out such people.

johnisgood · 1d ago
Eventually you will find the imposters (I have impostor syndrome, gives it a whole new spin), because AI does not replace your knowledge of the underlying concepts.

It just takes time at times.

otabdeveloper4 · 1d ago
> ...and which can say knowledgeable things at times while having no idea on what they are doing

This has been a thing forever, before AI. Lots of "programmers" at BigCorp have hacked the system and they know how to say the right words relevant to BigCorp's tech stack. Knowing how to actually program is entirely optional. (You can just copy-paste boilerplate from BigCorp's monorepo, writing boilerplate will be your day job anyways.)

apwell23 · 1d ago
yea for sure they hacked the system for promotions but they weren't checking in AI slop for rest of us to deal with.
seunosewa · 20h ago
They were checking in buggy spaghetti code though.
Maxion · 1d ago
> can we pls ban these coders from the industry :(

No, as these coders are what will ensure the rest of us will have a nice gravy train in 5 years.

pylotlight · 1d ago
Gotta wait for the crash first, when the buildup of poor code overwhelms the remaining few snr devs and mountain of those that are AI only.
cynicalsecurity · 1d ago
Letting AI do releases is a very very bad practice.
nsonha · 19h ago
yep, release is the first thing whose control you should delegate to AI, Skynet way.
sakesun · 1d ago
Letting AI control software releases might seem risky, but it may not be as problematic as it sounds—especially if you also use AI to handle issue support. :)
Deestan · 1d ago
Make sure you have AI customers also. Prompt them to love your product and you're good.
sakesun · 20h ago
Lot of downvote at my message. You are probably the only person who understand my joke :)
the_duke · 1d ago
Note the "10 Apr" date, so this precedes the availability of Codex and Jules, which are both quite good.