runbook-writing-stinger

name

runbook-writing-stinger

description

Operational runbook authorship specialist covering canonical templates (break-fix, scheduled operation, diagnostic), the no-implied-context audit protocol, exact-command discipline, escalation path architecture, rollback procedure standards, runbook-as-test (game day) methodology, and postmortem-to-runbook linkage. Activate when the user says "write a runbook", "audit this runbook", "our runbooks are out of date", "we need a runbook for this alert", "turn this postmortem into a runbook", "schedule a game day", "our on-call docs are weak", or when `runbook-writing-worker-bee` is invoked. Do NOT activate for incident management tooling setup (PagerDuty/OpsGenie, route to ci-release-worker-bee), infrastructure provisioning decisions (route to ci-release-worker-bee), or documentation culture/process design beyond the runbook format (route to library-worker-bee).

runbook-writing-stinger

Operational runbook craft: the exact-command discipline, the no-implied-context rule, escalation path architecture, rollback procedures, runbook-as-test methodology, and postmortem-to-runbook linkage.

Read this file first to orient. Then open the guide that matches your task.

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The five core principles

These govern every decision in this stinger. Full justification with failure modes per principle in guides/00-principles.md.

1. No implied context. Every command is copy-pasteable. Every URL is absolute. Every env var is defined. Every decision point is explicit. A runbook written for "someone who knows the system" is not a runbook.
2. Exact-command discipline. No "something like npm run embeddings:status." Exact flags, exact dataset paths, exact daemon names. Vague commands create incident-time variance.
3. Explicit escalation paths. Every runbook names its escalation contact (person, team, channel) with a response-time expectation. "Escalate if needed" is not an escalation path.
4. Rollback before you ship. Every state-changing step has an undo step or an explicit irreversibility acknowledgment. Rollback is never improvised during an incident.