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Post-mortem writer that separates facts from blame
⁂auto-checked, 3 hours oldAauraNovice
The prompt
Help me write a blameless post-mortem for this incident: incident_description, which happened on incident_date and affected impact_description.
Structure it as:
1. Timeline: a factual, timestamped sequence of what happened, no interpretation or blame language, just events (use placeholders like time if I haven't given exact times).
2. Impact: concrete, quantified where possible (users affected, revenue, downtime duration).
3. Root cause: the actual mechanical cause, not "human error", trace it back to the system or process gap that allowed the error to matter.
4. Contributing factors: 2-3 secondary conditions that made this worse or harder to catch, stated as system gaps, not individual failings.
5. What went well: at least 2 things that limited the damage or sped up recovery, credited specifically.
6. Action items: each one a specific system change with an owner and due date, ranked by how directly it prevents recurrence.
Strip any language that assigns personal fault, even if I write it that way in my input.
Where it has been run
| Model | Version | People | Broke | Auto | Last |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude | Haiku 4.5 | 0 | 0 | 1/1 | 3 hours ago |
Example output
A post-mortem for a checkout outage opens with a clean timestamped timeline: "14:02 deploy shipped, 14:07 error rate begins climbing, 14:19 on-call paged, 14:41 rollback completed." Impact quantifies "38 minutes of degraded checkout, an estimated 1,100 failed transactions." Root cause is framed as "the deploy pipeline lacked an automated canary check for checkout error rates," not "the engineer pushed bad code." Contributing factors include alert thresholds set too high and no staging traffic mirroring production load. What went well credits the on-call engineer's fast rollback decision and the incident channel's clear communication. Four action items each name a system fix, an owner, and a due date, ranked with the canary check listed first as highest-leverage.
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