Varlock Releases Bumpy: A File-Based Versioning Alternative to Changesets

Bumpy, a modern monorepo-friendly version management and changelog tool from the team behind Varlock, has been gaining traction as a self-described successor to changesets. First unveiled in April 2026 via a Show HN post from creator Theo Ephraim, the project now ships under the @varlock/bumpy package and claims to address more than 120 open issues from its predecessor.

Bumpy follows the familiar changesets workflow. Contributors drop a small markdown "bump file" into .bumpy/ that declares which packages should be released, at what level, with a changelog description. The files are reviewable in the PR diff, consolidated into a release PR by CI, and consumed when that PR merges. An example looks like this:

Where the two tools diverge is beneath that surface. Bumpy ships with full support for workspace: and catalog: protocols across npm, pnpm, Yarn and Bun, per-package custom publish commands for VS Code extensions, Docker images or JSR targets, and a configurable three-phase dependency propagation algorithm that lets teams decide how peer dep bumps cascade through their graph. The CI story is leaner too, with two commands, bumpy ci check and bumpy ci release, running directly in a standard GitHub Actions workflow with no GitHub App to install or separate action repo to trust.

Version 1.14 added branch-based prerelease channels where prerelease versions are derived at publish time and never committed to git. The design targets complaints documented in the changesets own prerelease docs, which describe their pre mode as "very complicated" with states that are "very hard to fix". Another differentiator is AI integration. Bumpy ships an agent skill that teaches LLMs how to inspect git changes, identify affected packages and generate bump files via bumpy add. It installs through the Vercel Labs skills CLI, the GitHub CLI, or as a Claude Code plugin.

Getting started is a single install and an init that migrates existing changesets projects automatically:

A Show HN thread was candid that the project "was coded using AI, but carefully", and the team notes it is already being used to release Varlock alongside 25+ related libraries and plugins. In a separate thread on polyglot monorepos, bumpy was mentioned as a tool that "fixes a few things with changesets around custom publishing". Teams evaluating migration have opened issues flagging gaps such as Yarn 4.10 catalog detection.

Competition tightened with the changesets v3 release in August 2026, which closed many of the long-standing issues bumpy originally targeted. Bumpy's own differences doc now compares against v3 and credits it as "a substantial cleanup", while pointing out remaining gaps around configurable propagation, catalogs, custom publish targets and prerelease workflows. Relative to semantic-release, bumpy keeps the file-based model but adds a bumpy generate command that can produce bump files from branch commits when teams want to bridge both styles.

Bumpy is MIT-licensed, built in TypeScript, and available via the @varlock/bumpy package on npm, with the full source and documentation on GitHub.