Impress your boss with AI-generated GitHub summaries

2025-06-13
Impress your boss with AI-generated GitHub summaries

“What have you done this week?” That dreaded question in standups, sprint reviews, or 1:1s. You know you’ve been working hard, but articulating it clearly—especially in a way that makes sense to non-technical stakeholders—can be tricky.

Let AI do the talking for you.

Here’s how to automatically generate a crisp, high-level summary of your team’s GitHub activity using the GitHub CLI and ChatGPT.

Step 1: Fetch the past week of GitHub commits

Open your terminal and run the gh command:

SINCE=$(date -v -7d +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)
gh api "repos/ORGNAME/REPONAME/commits?since=$SINCE" \
  --paginate \
  -q '.[].commit.message' > commits.txt

(Replace ORGNAME and REPONAME with your actual GitHub org/repo. Also if you run 14 day sprints or so, change the date range.)

This grabs all GitHub commit messages from the past 7 days and saves them to commits.txt.

Step 2: Ask ChatGPT for a summary

Paste this prompt into ChatGPT along with the contents of commits.txt:

Take this 7-day Git history and write a high-level executive summary in 4–8 bullets.
Group them into two sections: user-facing and internal logic.
Start each bullet with a **bold keyword**.
Use simple language (not technical), and don’t include issue numbers.

Example output

User-facing

  • Performance: Improved loading speed across multiple pages for smoother user experience.
  • Clarity: Updated several button labels to be more intuitive.
  • Polish: Fixed minor UI glitches in the mobile view.

Internal logic

  • Refactoring: Cleaned up legacy auth logic to be more maintainable.
  • Stability: Added error handling around key API calls.
  • Automation: Introduced script to reset test database automatically before CI runs.

Why this works

  • It saves time. You don’t need to manually comb through commits.
  • It sounds good. AI knows how to phrase things for non-devs.
  • It’s repeatable. Make it a weekly ritual.

Whether it’s your boss, your client, or your future self—this little trick makes you look organized, insightful, and on top of your game!