Context There is one cheap way to ask python-semantic-release whether it will write your changelog. It answers would have written your changelog to CHANGELOG.md . It answers that for a setup that writes nothing. Mine wrote nothing for thirty releases. A few weeks ago I wrote Green CI ≠ working software . The argument there was that a green badge proves the job exited 0 and nothing more, so you should stop reading badges and start asserting effects. This post is what happened next....