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EndikaEndika/eskills/skills/postmortem/SKILL.md

postmortem

Skill0 starsChanged 56 days agoMITView on GitHub

Use when capturing an important bug or production failure — record the incident, root cause, fix, and lesson as an archivable markdown document.

44 other projects use a version of this.

Adopted by

Most recently taken up by

Used with

Projects with it also use hypothesis-driven-debugging, status-report and 10 more.

Other files people use alongside this one.

Files found in the same public projects as a version of this one, more often than they turn up anywhere else. Each project counts once, large collections count for less, and this file's own repository is left out.
  • Sturla22Skill

    hypothesis-driven-debugging

    Debug by ranking concrete hypotheses and running discriminating checks. Use when a bug is hard to localize, many plausible failure points exist, logs are noisy or misleading, a symptom appears intermittently, or trial-and-error edits haven't worked.

    Also in 3 projects that use this

  • AnthropicSkill

    status-report

    Generate a status report with KPIs, risks, and action items. Use when writing a weekly or monthly update for leadership, summarizing project health with green/yellow/red status, surfacing risks and decisions that need stakeholder attention, or turning a pile of project tracker activity into a readable narrative.

    Also in 3 projects that use this

  • seongjaeryuSkill

    organize

    Organize knowledge into Sets

    Also in 3 projects that use this

  • SaluteYBSkill

    skill-eval

    Evaluate, tune, and regression-check AgentSkills. Use when creating a new skill or improving an existing one and you need structured should-trigger, should-not-trigger, boundary-case, and execution-quality examples. Also use when auditing overlapping skills and sharpening trigger descriptions before release.

    Also in 3 projects that use this

  • neurofooSkill

    premortem

    Pre-mortem analysis that imagines a plan has failed, then works backward to identify causes and preventions. Use before launches, major decisions, or risky initiatives to surface hidden risks.

    Also in 3 projects that use this

  • AnthropicSkill

    incident-response

    Run an incident response workflow — triage, communicate, and write postmortem. Trigger with "we have an incident", "production is down", an alert that needs severity assessment, a status update mid-incident, or when writing a blameless postmortem after resolution.

    Also in 4 projects that use this

The file

We split this skill into the rules it gives an agent

3 rules. 0 are common, 2 are distinctive, and 1 is very specific to this project.

  • 0

    Common

    Most of the 40 edited versions we read keep these.

  • 2

    Distinctive

    This author's own choices. Worth a look.

  • 1

    Very specific

    Tied to their project's names, files or tools. Probably skip.

  • Common
  • Distinctive
  • Very specific
  1. Distinctive:

    After an important bug or failure, capture what happened and why so the same class of problem can't quietly recur.

    line 10
  2. Distinctive:

    NOT every small hiccup — a typo fixed in 30 seconds doesn't need a postmortem.

    line 17
  3. Very specific:

    Find the real root cause first: Use superpowers:systematic-debugging — don't document the symptom or the first plausible guess.

    line 21

“Common” is measured: kept by at least 6 in 10 of the 40 edited versions of this file we could read. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.

Keep what fits and drop the rest. Your version, ready for your agents.
Files
SKILL.md

postmortem

Overview

After an important bug or failure, capture what happened and why so the same class of problem can't quietly recur. Blameless: the target is the system and the gap, not who typed it. The output is one archivable markdown file.

When to use

  • A production failure, data issue, broken release, or a bug that cost real time.
  • NOT every small hiccup — a typo fixed in 30 seconds doesn't need a postmortem.

Steps

  1. Find the real root cause first. Use superpowers:systematic-debugging — don't document the symptom or the first plausible guess. The postmortem is only as good as the cause it names.
  2. Fill the template from evidence, not memory: the actual error output, the commit/PR that fixed it, and the timeline if order mattered.
  3. Make prevention concrete. "Be more careful" is not prevention. Name the specific thing that would have caught or blocked it: a test, a guard/validation, a CI gate, a CLAUDE.md note, or a durable memory.
  4. Save it outside the repo: ../<repo>-notes/postmortems/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md. Internal docs are never committed (see standards) — archive it, don't ship it.

Template

# Postmortem: <short title>

- **Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
- **Severity:** low | medium | high
- **Impact:** who/what was affected, for how long

## Incident

<one paragraph: the observable failure>

## Timeline (only if order mattered)

- HH:MM — …

## Root cause

<the underlying cause found via systematic-debugging — the "why", not the symptom>

## Fix

<what changed; commit / PR reference>

## Prevention

<the specific thing that stops this class of bug recurring>

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