Version Bump Advisor

Before you begin: verify references

Confirm that every path in this skill's frontmatter references: exists relative to this SKILL.md. If any is missing, stop: the install is incomplete, usually because a flattening installer (for example npx skills install) dropped the repo-root knowledge-notes/ directory. Tell the user to reinstall by a method in 1-INSTALL.md and run verify-install.sh from the install root. Proceed without the references only if the user explicitly says to, and then say in the output that it was produced without the pack's reference material.

Context

Design system versioning is a persistent source of team friction. Breaking changes are called minor because they "just affect two components." Minor improvements trigger unnecessary major bumps because someone worries about change. And the reasoning is never written down, so every release prompts the same debate.

This skill removes the subjectivity by applying a consistent classification framework to every change, then generating a changelog entry and reasoning that the team can trust. When the next release ships, there's a record of why it was a major and what consumers need to change.

This is the pack's single source for semver calls. Other skills (change-communication, contribution-workflow, deprecation-process, decision-record) point here rather than classifying changes themselves.

Steps

0. Establish the baseline

If you have repository access, read the current version from the package's package.json (each published package, in a monorepo) so the recommendation names the actual next version. Then diff the exported surface between the last release tag and the change: exported component names, prop types and defaults from the published type definitions (.d.ts or the types entry), token names, CSS custom properties, and the exports map in package.json. A change list from the user is a starting point; the diff is what catches the removal nobody mentioned. If you can't read either, say so and classify from the change list alone.