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postmortem

Skill1 starsChanged 29 days agoMITView on GitHub

Use when the user wants a postmortem, incident review, incident report, or RCA write-up after an outage or incident has been resolved.

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 9 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.
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  • 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

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  • 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

6 rules. 0 are common, 5 are distinctive, and 1 is very specific to this project.

  • 0

    Common

    Most of the 40 edited versions we read keep these.

  • 5

    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. Very specific:

    Use the file the user names.

    line 12
  2. Distinctive:

    No file → ask the user for the timeline or notes.

    line 24
  3. Distinctive:

    Ask up to 3 questions, only for facts the write-up needs and the file lacks: impact numbers, how it was detected, the root cause if unknown.

    line 28
  4. Distinctive:

    Always check detection: compute the gap between the symptom starting and the first alert or page.

    line 34
  5. Distinctive:

    Every timeline line comes from the incident file or the user.

    line 58
  6. Distinctive:

    Never save a file without an explicit yes.

    line 68

“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

Turn an incident into a blameless write-up that makes the next one less likely.

1. Find the incident

Use the file the user names. Otherwise take the most recent incident-*.md in the current folder with Status: Resolved. Its format:

# Incident: <title>
Status: Resolved
Started: <YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM> UTC
Severity: <SEV1 | SEV2 | SEV3>
## Impact
## Timeline (UTC)
## Actions

No file → ask the user for the timeline or notes.

2. Fill gaps

Ask up to 3 questions, only for facts the write-up needs and the file lacks: impact numbers, how it was detected, the root cause if unknown.

3. Write it blameless

Describe systems, decisions and missing safeguards, never people. A person who acted becomes a role ("an engineer deployed a config change"). Ask "why did the system allow this?", not "who did this?". Never write that someone made a mistake or is at fault.

Always check detection: compute the gap between the symptom starting and the first alert or page. If people (customers, support) noticed first, say so.

4. Template

# Postmortem: <title> (<YYYY-MM-DD>)
**Status:** Draft · **Severity:** <SEVn> · **Duration:** <start> → <end> UTC

## Summary
<3 sentences: what broke, who was affected, how it was fixed>

## Impact
## Timeline (UTC)
## Root cause
## Detection
<how and when we found out; time from start to first alert>
## What went well
## What went wrong
## Action items
| Action | Type | Owner | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| <specific action> | prevent / detect / mitigate | <role or TBD (confirm)> | <date or TBD> |

Every timeline line comes from the incident file or the user.

5. Hand off

Show the draft in chat. Offer to save it as postmortem-<same date>-<same slug>.md next to the incident file. Save only after an explicit yes.

Rules

  • Blameless: roles, not names; systems, not mistakes.
  • Action items are specific, typed, and owned.
  • Never save a file without an explicit yes.

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