Release checklist and changelog skills for Claude Code

Every minor release at Thrive Themes followed the same 28-step checklist: beta cutoff, deploy coordination, internal and customer changelogs, post-release closeout. I ran it by hand for the first several releases, then turned it into a set of Claude Code skills published to the company skills platform.

What they do

• Release checklist generator builds the dated, role-assigned Asana checklist for a given release number.
• Changelog generator reads the merged pull requests for the release and drafts the customer-facing and internal changelogs.
• Each skill includes a self-verification step that compares its output back to the source data and fails loudly on a mismatch, rather than quietly shipping something wrong.

Why it mattered

The point was never speed. It was that the release process stopped living in my head. Another team can pick up the skill and run the same process without me in the room.