The author created a full CI/CD pipeline for a VS Code extension using GitHub Actions, allowing them to automate testing, releasing, and publishing their extension with automatic release notes generation based on Angular Commit Message Conventions. They used the vsce tool for publishing and utilized semantic-release for automating version management and release note generation. The pipeline runs tests on Mac, Windows, and Linux, creates a new GitHub release with proper release notes, and publishes the new version to Visual Studio's marketplace upon pushing a new commit to the master branch.