It was the conscience of the pipeline.
"Patched CVE-2024-1234" – 312 duplicates. "Updated README formatting" – 89 duplicates. "Fixed flaky integration test (retry logic)" – 203 duplicates.
[INFO] First original entry in 731 days: "Refactored dupe detection engine – now watches the watchers."
[WARN] Duplicate entry detected: "Fixed navbar overflow on mobile" – seen 47 times across 12 changelogs.
He ran the full scan.
Leo, the team’s junior release engineer, stared at the alert. He’d built the Changelogs Dupe Finder as a lunch-break script. A toy, really. Just something to scrape release notes from their microservices and flag copy-pasted entries.
And somewhere in the logs, a new warning appeared: