Postmortem Writing
Write blameless incident postmortems with root cause analysis, timelines, and action items
- Repository
- wshobson/agents
- Stars
- 42,095
- Licence
- MIT
- Files
- 2 files
What it does
Once installed, the agent follows a structured guide for writing post-incident reviews after outages or failures. It helps draft postmortem documents focused on what system conditions allowed a problem rather than who caused it, builds timelines, runs 5 Whys root cause analysis, lists follow-up action items, and can outline how to facilitate a 60-minute review meeting. It draws on templates for both major and minor incidents stored in a reference file.
Great for
- Engineers or SRE teams writing a postmortem after a production outage
- Engineering managers who want a consistent, blameless review format
- Teams starting an incident review process for the first time
Skip it if
- Live incident response while an outage is still happening, since the skill is for after-the-fact reviews
- Organisations that need a legally reviewed or regulatory-compliant incident report, because the templates are generic examples that a human must verify
Try asking
- “Write a blameless postmortem for yesterday's database connection outage using this timeline: ...”
- “Help me run a 5 Whys analysis on why our deploy caused a 20-minute API slowdown”
- “Create a quick postmortem template for a minor SEV3 cache incident”
- “Draft a 60-minute postmortem meeting agenda for our team”
Install in 3 steps
- 1
Download the skill
The ZIP contains the 2 original files, the MIT licence and an attribution note.
postmortem-writing.zip - 2
Add it to your agent
Claude Code (all projects)
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip postmortem-writing.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)
mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip postmortem-writing.zip -d .claude/skills/Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.
- 3
Ask for the task
No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.
Get better results
- Provide the real timeline, metrics, and ticket references so the agent can fill templates with specifics instead of placeholders.
- Review generated root causes and action items yourself; the examples are illustrative and the agent may over-assume causes from limited input.
- Keep the document blameless by asking the agent to phrase findings around system conditions, then check for any remaining names.
What's inside
- references/details.md
- SKILL.md
Redistributed unmodified from wshobson/agents under the MIT licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.