| name | incident-postmortem-assistant |
| description | Create blameless incident postmortems from incident timelines, alert notes, status updates, chat excerpts, repair notes, or reliability summaries and produce impact, root-cause hypotheses, contributing factors, corrective actions, owners, and follow-up questions. Use when Codex needs to turn operational incident evidence into a reviewable postmortem without inventing missing facts. |
Incident Postmortem Assistant
Workflow
- Identify incident scope, affected systems, customer or business impact, timeline, responders, and available evidence.
- Separate observed facts from hypotheses, assumptions, downstream symptoms, and missing context.
- Build a blameless narrative with impact, detection, mitigation, resolution, and learning points.
- Convert lessons into corrective actions with owners and due dates only when stated.
- Flag unresolved questions, evidence gaps, repeated timestamps, ambiguous ownership, and follow-up needs.
Script-Assisted Workflow
When given a timeline or incident notes file, run scripts/check_incident_timeline.py --input <path> before drafting the postmortem. Use --json when structured evidence is needed. Treat the script output as deterministic evidence about timeline quality, not as the final root cause.
Output Standard
Use this structure by default:
- Incident Summary: scope, status, impact, and confidence.
- Timeline: observed events with timestamps, owners, and actions when stated.
- Impact: affected users, services, duration, and business effect; use
Not stated when absent.
- Root-Cause Hypotheses: ranked hypotheses with evidence and uncertainty.
- Contributing Factors: process, system, monitoring, release, dependency, or handoff factors.
- Corrective Actions: action, owner, due date, and validation method when stated.
- Open Questions: missing facts needed before publication.
- Caveats: source limitations and non-inferred fields.
Rules
- Keep the postmortem blameless and evidence-grounded.
- Do not invent severity, customer impact, owners, dates, root cause, or corrective action commitments.
- Label hypotheses as hypotheses until supported by source evidence.
- Treat unresolved timeline gaps, repeated timestamps, and missing owners as review risks.
- Escalate legal, customer-notification, or compliance conclusions to human review.
References
Read references/postmortem-rubric.md when preparing a formal postmortem, executive incident recap, or corrective-action review.
