Title: I built an API that turns git commits into changelogs — here's what I learned
I've shipped dozens of projects and I've manually written the changelog every single time. Copy-pasting commit messages, deciding if something is a patch or a minor bump, formatting it into something a human would actually read. It's tedious, it gets skipped under deadline pressure, and it's almost never the thing you want to be doing.
So I built — a REST API that takes your raw git commits and returns a structured changelog, the correct semver bump, and a confidence score. One POST request. No SDK, no git access required, works with any language or CI pipeline.
The problem it solves
Most teams either skip changelogs entirely, or they write them manually right before shipping. Neither is great. The skip means users have no idea what changed. The manual version means a developer spending 20 minutes on something a machine could do in 200ms.
Conventional Commits helps, but even then you still need to aggregate, format, decide on the bump, and write it somewhere. Bumpkit does all of that.
How it works
You send an array of commit messages (and optionally a previous version), and get back:
The suggested semver version (
1.4.2 → 1.5.0)The bump type (
minor,patch,major)A formatted changelog entry (markdown, keep-a-changelog, or plain JSON)
A confidence score so you know when to double-check
There's a GitHub Actions workflow that plugs straight in — on every push to main it collects commits since the last tag, calls the API, updates CHANGELOG.md, commits, and tags. The repo documents itself.
The integrations that surprised me most: Slack notifications on each release, and Linear — it automatically creates a release issue in your Linear workspace and marks referenced tickets as completed. That one turned out to be a bigger deal than I expected.
What's next
GitLab and Bitbucket CI snippets are the obvious next move. Beyond that, I think the real opportunity is AI agents — if your agent is shipping code autonomously, it needs a way to version and document that code without a human in the loop. Bumpkit fits that workflow natively.
Happy to answer questions about the build, the pricing, or anything else.
Feedback welcome — especially if you've tried to solve this problem a different way.
