epic(ci): Automated release notes for GitHub releases

User Story

As a developer or technical buyer evaluating or operating dotCMS, I want every GitHub release to have a populated description with categorized changelogs, so that I can quickly understand what changed, what broke, and what I need to do — without waiting for someone to manually write the notes.

Problem

Every dotCMS release requires someone to manually read through GitHub issues, review PRs, and write a changelog for dev.dotcms.com/docs/changelogs. Meanwhile, GitHub release descriptions at github.com/dotCMS/core/releases are created empty (generate_release_notes: false in the release prepare workflow). With near-daily releases, this manual process doesn't scale.

Solution

An automated pipeline that generates developer-facing release notes for every dotCMS release:

1. TypeScript data-gathering script extracts PR details, labels, and categorization from GitHub API
2. Claude AI writes polished changelog prose from the structured data
3. GitHub Actions orchestrates the pipeline as a non-blocking job in the existing release workflow

Architecture:

release-prepare → build → deployment → release → release-notes (non-blocking)
                                                ↘              ↘
                                          finalize (always)   report (always)

Pipeline flow (within release-notes job):

1. Idempotency check (skip if notes exist)
2. TS script gathers data → structured JSON
3. Prompt assembled (template + JSON)
4. Claude writes /tmp/release-notes.md (Write tool only)
5. gh release edit updates the release (deterministic shell step)

Key design decisions:

• Separation of concerns: Claude only writes prose (Write tool access). The gh release edit runs as a plain shell step for auditability
• Non-blocking: release-notes job uses if: success() and doesn't block finalize or report
• Idempotent: Checks if release body already has content before running — safe for job reruns
• Tag filtering: Skips CLI (dotcms-cli-*) and LTS (*_lts_*) releases automatically
• Reusable: Same component used by both the release pipeline and a standalone backfill workflow

Changelog format:

• 4 sections: Features & Enhancements, Fixes and Known Issues, Deprecations/EOL/Reminders, Infrastructure & Security
• [!CAUTION] rollback warning when Not Safe To Rollback labels detected
• Changelog: Skip label support to omit internal changes
• Every bullet links to its PR for traceability

Phases

Files

References

• Test PR in core-workflow-test: dotCMS/core-workflow-test#451
• Existing release workflow: .github/workflows/cicd_6-release.yml
• Claude action reference: anthropics/claude-code-action@v1