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postmortem

Skill1 starsChanged 2 months agoMITView on GitHub

Write a blameless postmortem using the template — table header, timezone-stamped timeline, root cause traced end to end, owned and dated action items. Systems and decisions, never people. Use when asked to "write a postmortem", "do the incident writeup", "RCA for X", after a SEV is resolved.

44 other projects use a version of this.

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Projects with it also use hypothesis-driven-debugging, status-report and 8 more.

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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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The file

We split this skill into the rules it gives an agent

1 rule. 0 are common, 1 is distinctive, and 0 are very specific to this project.

  • 0

    Common

    Most of the 40 edited versions we read keep these.

  • 1

    Distinctive

    This author's own choices. Worth a look.

  • 0

    Very specific

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

  • Common
  • Distinctive
  • Very specific
  1. Distinctive:

    Timely: Write within a few days, while the timeline is still recoverable from memory and chat history.

    line 18

“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

Fills in docs/templates/POSTMORTEM.md.

Principles

  • Blameless. Describe systems, code, and decisions — never individuals. Use roles ("the on-call", "the deploy") not names. If a human action contributed, the finding is "the system allowed / didn't catch it", not "person X did Y".
  • Mechanism over narrative. The root cause is a traced chain, the same standard as incident/investigate-bug — which change, which condition, which interaction.
  • Timely. Write within a few days, while the timeline is still recoverable from memory and chat history.

Process

  1. Rebuild the timeline from alerts, chat, deploy logs, dashboards. Timezone- stamp every entry: detection, escalation, each diagnostic step, mitigation, confirmation of recovery.
  2. Quantify impact — requests failed, users affected, duration, data loss, SLA. Real numbers, not "some users".
  3. Trace the root cause end to end, including contributing factors (what made it possible, what made it worse, why it wasn't caught sooner).
  4. Separate mitigation from fix — what stopped the bleeding vs the permanent change (link the PR).
  5. Analyse detection — how it was found, time-to-detect, and why that long.
  6. What went well / poorly / got lucky — honest, specific.
  7. Action items — every one concrete, owned, dated, tracked. Order: prevent first, then detect faster, then respond faster. Don't let it become a wishlist; 3–6 real items beats 20 aspirational ones.
  8. Save to docs/incidents/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md. Status Resolved → Closed once action items are filed.

House conventions

  • Header is a table. One --- between every section. Emoji H2s as in the template.
  • Severity: SEV1 (major outage / data loss), SEV2 (significant degradation), SEV3 (minor / contained).
  • Conventional-commit: docs: add postmortem for <incident>.

Anti-patterns

  • ❌ Naming or implying blame on a person.
  • ❌ "Human error" as a root cause — that's where the analysis starts, not ends.
  • ❌ A vague timeline with no timestamps.
  • ❌ Action items with no owner or no date.
  • ❌ Conflating the mitigation with the permanent fix.

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