Writing

Turn merged PRs into launch posts you'd actually publish

Thomas Bradley 2 min read

You shipped something. It’s merged, it’s deployed, it’s good. And then it sits there, because writing about it feels like a second job — so the work goes unseen, or you paste it into a generic AI prompt and get back a post that opens with “Excited to announce” and says nothing.

There’s a better default. The pull request you just merged already contains the post. Here’s how to get it out.

Start from the diff, not a blank page

A blank text box invites waffle. A merged PR doesn’t — it’s a record of a real decision. Before you write a word, pull these four things straight from it:

  • What changed, in one plain sentence (the PR title is usually close).
  • Who it’s for — the user, not the codebase.
  • Why it matters — the problem it removes, stated as a before/after.
  • One concrete detail — a number, a constraint, a thing that used to break.

That last one is what stops a post reading like every other post. Specific beats clever, every time.

Write it the way you’d say it

If you wouldn’t say it out loud to another engineer over coffee, cut it. Three rules that do most of the work:

  1. Lead with the change, not the fanfare. “You can now X” beats “We’re thrilled to share…”.
  2. One idea per post. A PR that does five things is five posts, not one list.
  3. End with the link and nothing else. No twelve hashtags, no “thoughts?”.

Make it repeatable

The reason this doesn’t happen is friction, not ability. So remove the friction: write the post in the same pass as the PR description while the context is fresh, keep a two-line template (What changed · why it matters · link), and post on a fixed cadence so it’s a habit rather than a decision.

Do that and a week of merges becomes a week of posts that sound like you, because they came from your work and your words.

Or skip the copy-paste

That whole loop — read the merged PR, pull out what matters, write it in your voice — is exactly what ShipPost automates. It takes a merged GitHub PR and drafts a LinkedIn post and a tweet that read like you wrote them, using your own API key. No key-harvesting, no slop, no “Excited to announce.” You edit and publish; it removes the blank page. Here’s what ShipPost does in full.

Try ShipPost