Before every release, somebody generates the notes. It used to take twenty minutes of scrolling the commit log. Now a model does it in four seconds, and there are a dozen products that will do it for you.
We got dramatically faster at producing a document nobody uses to decide anything.
Two different artifacts
Release notes are a communication artifact. Past tense, written outward, for people who weren't in the room — users, support, the changelog page. "Added X. Fixed Y." Their job is to tell someone what already happened.
The deploy decision needs a risk artifact. Future tense, written inward, for the person about to press the button. Its job is to say what could go wrong and what to check first.
