[Tomasz Naumowicz (tnaum-ms)]

Summary

Require the release-notes agent to ask whether a placeholder discussion already exists before publishing a release announcement, so an existing WIP announcement is reused instead of duplicated.

• Ask for the placeholder URL, or confirm a URL already supplied, and wait for the operator's answer.
• Create a discussion only after the operator confirms there is no placeholder.
• Validate a confirmed placeholder's repository, Announcements category, and intended release, then update its title and body using the documented GraphQL commands.
• For patches, reuse only the dedicated patch discussion; retain the version-based parent announcement lookup and post the parent comment after publishing the patch discussion.
• Keep the skill, publishing reference, and contributor instructions consistent.

Scope

Documentation and agent workflow only. The branch was fast-forwarded to current main before applying this focused change. The older, uncommitted publishing draft was preserved in a local stash rather than reintroduced alongside the current guide.

No changes to notification behavior, image uploads, release contents, or dependency manifests. No release announcement was published while validating this change.

Validation

Case 2 checks ran after the request to mark this PR ready:

• npm run prettier-fix passed; its formatting changes were committed and pushed.
• npm run lint passed.
• The full unit test run passed: 5,184 tests, zero failures.
• npm run build passed, including workspace builds.
• npm run package passed.
• Localization generation was not applicable: no localized strings changed.
• git diff --check passed.
• Focused documentation assertions passed for the required question, supplied-URL confirmation, placeholder update mutation, patch ordering, parent lookup, contributor guidance, and 11 non-template relative reference targets.
• Live Discussion writes were deliberately not exercised.

Review readiness

This PR remains a draft because the required AI pre-review and recorded author decisions have not been committed. The automated handoff checks passed, but that review requirement is still outstanding.

[github-actions]

✅ CI passed: standard tier (ready PR)

Commit 322bc66, workflow run.

Layer	Result	Ran or skipped because
Static checks	✅ passed	every push
Unit tests	✅ passed	every push
npm packages: verify tarballs	⏭️ skipped	no change to packages/**, package-lock.json or the CI workflow
VSIX: inspect contents	✅ passed	ready PR
VSIX: self-test of the checks	⏭️ skipped	no change to build/verification/**, build/vite/**, the Vite configs, package-lock.json or the CI workflow
VSIX: activate in VS Code	✅ passed	ready PR
VSIX: self-test of the activation check	⏭️ skipped	no change to build/verification/**, build/vite/**, the Vite configs, package-lock.json or the CI workflow
Webview host in unbundled extensions	⏭️ skipped	no change to packages/vscode-ext-webview/**, package-lock.json or the CI workflow
E2E	⏭️ not available yet	arrives with the E2E iteration (full tier)

Full run: add the ci:full-requested label to run every layer once on the current commit.
No full run yet.

Code quality

Check	Status	How to fix
Localization (l10n)	✅ Passed	Nothing to fix
ESLint	✅ Passed	Nothing to fix
Prettier formatting	✅ Passed	Nothing to fix

Build size

No page, activation, VSIX or other bundle size changed by 5% or 50 KiB or more against main. VSIX: 8.5 MiB.

Artifacts: VSIX | Bundle-reports-39642707125 | L1-manifest-report-39642707125

All graphs (exact bytes)

Graph	PR bytes	Base bytes	Delta bytes	Delta %
Collection View page (collectionView)	6,036,286	6,036,286	✅ 0	0.0%
Document View page (documentView)	4,808,762	4,808,762	✅ 0	0.0%
Local Quick Start page (localQuickStart)	1,551,408	1,551,408	✅ 0	0.0%
Atlas Credentials page (atlasCredentials)	1,504,612	1,504,612	✅ 0	0.0%
Cluster Dashboard page (clusterDashboard)	1,550,863	1,550,863	✅ 0	0.0%
Activation (mainStartup)	3,448,763	3,448,763	✅ 0	0.0%
Extension host (main)	9,975,455	9,975,455	✅ 0	0.0%
Playground worker (playgroundWorker)	5,384,556	5,384,556	✅ 0	0.0%
VSIX (vsix)	8,941,525	8,941,525	✅ 0	0.0%
playgroundTsPlugin	6,175	6,175	✅ 0	0.0%
viewsEntry	1,456,593	1,456,593	✅ 0	0.0%
viewsAssets	80,340	80,340	✅ 0	0.0%
editorWorker	259,528	259,528	✅ 0	0.0%
jsonWorker	389,389	389,389	✅ 0	0.0%

Packaged bytes. Shared chunks count in every graph that loads them, so rows do not add up.

Updated in place on every run.