Diff-aware changelog generator that writes user-facing release notes, not commit soup
Across a 372-point HN thread and a same-week Ask HN, developers (including the maintainer of Keep a Changelog) are rejecting the commit-driven changelog paradigm: tools like git-cliff, semantic-release, and release-please dump filtered commit and PR titles that read as soup and do not tell a user what a release means for them. The articulated need is a tool that does the editorial job, analyzing a release's actual diffs and PRs, dropping internal noise, and producing audience-appropriate, impact-grouped notes, without forcing upfront contributor discipline (changesets) or platform lock-in.
This brushes the AI-writes-my-changelogs cliche, so the wedge has to be editorial-translation quality, not AI for its own sake. Be diff-aware (read the actual changes, not just commit or label text), filter user-facing versus internal by default, ship a draft human-review step, and keep it local-first with no platform lock-in. That is the gap every commit-driven tool leaves open.
landscape (3 existing solutions)
The incumbent category is commit and label-driven aggregation, and the editorial alternative (changesets, Keep a Changelog) just moves the manual writing to PR time. There is no dominant, self-hostable, source-controlled tool that reads a release's real diffs and PRs, filters internal noise, and writes user-impact-grouped notes.