Claude Code does our releases now

10 Apr 2025

Since Anthropic launched Claude Code we've been using it at Molin a lot. It's the best programming agent I've seen so far: it gives concise answers, it can run shell tools as well as edit files, and it's smart enough to make the right call — most of the time. The UX is excellent, too: most times you just press Enter to approve or Esc to give it a new instruction.

Recently I've started automating some processes from our engineering team. Some of them were already optimised and thus quick, but less manual work is always better.

We release 1-3 times per week. This involves creating a PR, checking the diff, and then deploying our backend. If we modified the widget script that gets embedded on our merchants' websites then we need to publish that JS bundle too. Not that slow, but not that quick either.

Now Claude can do everything for us thanks to this file stored in .claude/release.md:

I need your help to create a new release PR.

Releases always happen from branch `staging` into branch `main`.
Release PRs are always prefixed with `Release: ` and include a succinct but exhaustive list of what changed, e.g. `Release: refactored A, new B, fixed C`.
To generate the list of changes, simply look at the commit messages that are new in `staging` since `main` was last updated.
Do not create a new branch for the release, unless instructed.

So please:

1. Check if there exists a release PR already. When you check, do not grep, just list ALL PRs.
2. If not, create a new PR from `staging` to `main` as explained above and show me the PR URL. Then stop and ask me if I want to merge it.
3. If I say "next" or "merge", then you must check if the PR has been merged. If it has been merged already, just say so.
4. If it has not been merged, then you must also check if all checks pass. List them for me.
5. If all checks passed, or I tell you to merge it anyway, then you must merge it.
6. If I say "deploy", then you must deploy the `main` branch to production. Do so by triggering the GitHub Actions workflow called `Deploy worker`.

Note: Edited for brevity. Claude always reads our README.md first for extra context.

When I run it, Claude will use gh and git and follow our checklist. Leverage!

We have similar commands for debugging product feeds, deployments, and more. Here's bootstrap.md:

We need to verify that the current dev environment is correctly set up.

- verify that we have `node` + `npm` installed and which versions — if not installed then run `brew install node`
- ensure the `OrbStack.app` macOS app is installed - if not installed, then suggest the user to install it using `brew install orbstack` because it's the best way to run Docker on macOS
...

#engineering