Post Mortems with AI
Write better postmortems with AI — draft timelines from chat and alerts, keep the language blameless, surface contributing factors, and turn findings into action items that ship.
Prompts
- Advanced
Postmortem Counterfactual Analysis Prompt
Rigorously explore what would have detected or prevented this incident sooner — testing each counterfactual against what was actually knowable in the moment, so you avoid hindsight-driven action items.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
Open prompt - Intermediate
Postmortem Customer and Business Impact Quantifier Prompt
Turn raw incident data into a defensible impact section — users affected, error-budget burn, SLA credit exposure, and a bounded dollar estimate — instead of a vague 'some customers were affected'.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
Open prompt - Intermediate
Postmortem Executive Summary Translator Prompt
Translate a detailed technical postmortem into a one-page executive or board summary — impact, cause, response, and what changes — in business language, without distorting the facts or smuggling in blame.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
Open prompt - Intermediate
Postmortem Findings to Engineering Tickets Prompt
Convert postmortem findings into well-scoped engineering tickets — each with a clear title, candidate owner role, acceptance criteria, defense type, and a realistic due date — so the lessons turn into tracked work instead of a buried action-items list.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
Open prompt - Intermediate
Postmortem Format Selector Prompt
Decide whether this specific incident is best told as a narrative, a strict timeline, a 5-whys, or a contributing-factors analysis — before you start writing the document.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
Open prompt - Advanced
Postmortem Multi-Team Contributing Factors Untangler Prompt
Untangle the contributing factors in an incident that crossed service and team boundaries — attributing factors to systems, not people, and mapping the seams where handoffs and ownership gaps let it propagate.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
Open prompt - Intermediate
Postmortem QA Reviewer Prompt
Run a quality pass over a finished postmortem draft to flag missing sections, claims unsupported by the timeline, and unaddressed single points of failure — before it goes to review.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
Open prompt - Intermediate
Postmortem Sanitize-for-Public-Sharing Prompt
Prepare an internal postmortem for external or cross-customer sharing by finding secrets, PII, customer names, and internal details that must be stripped or redacted — without gutting the technical lesson.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
Open prompt - Beginner
Postmortem What-Went-Well Section Writer Prompt
Write a genuine 'what went well / strengths' section that captures the defenses and good calls that contained the incident — so the postmortem reinforces what to keep, not only what to fix.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
Open prompt - Intermediate
RCA Document Quality Scoring Rubric Prompt
Score a finished root-cause analysis document against a quality rubric and return specific gaps to fix before sign-off
- Claude
- ChatGPT
Open prompt - Beginner
Postmortem Blameful Language Detector Prompt
Scan a postmortem draft for blameful or judgmental language and rewrite it into blameless, systems-focused phrasing
- Claude
- ChatGPT
Open prompt - Advanced
Swiss-Cheese Contributing-Factors Analysis Prompt
Decompose an incident into the layered defenses that failed using the Swiss-cheese model, surfacing the latent and active contributing factors rather than a single root cause.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
Open prompt - Intermediate
Postmortem Review Meeting Facilitation Prompt
Design and run an effective postmortem review meeting — agenda, timeboxes, facilitation scripts, and decision gates — so the room converges on systemic causes and committed actions instead of re-litigating the timeline.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
Open prompt - Advanced
Recurring Pattern Mining Across Postmortems Prompt
Analyze a corpus of past postmortems to surface systemic, recurring failure patterns — the same root cause wearing different hats — and recommend the few structural fixes that would prevent whole classes of incidents.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
Open prompt - Advanced
Blameless Root Cause Analysis Facilitation Prompt
Facilitate a rigorous blameless RCA that separates contributing factors from blame, surfaces systemic gaps, and produces durable action items — not a name-and-shame report.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
Open prompt - Beginner
Blameless Retrospective Facilitation Guide Prompt
Generate a facilitator's guide for running a blameless post-incident retrospective meeting — agenda, timeboxes, psychological-safety techniques, probing questions, and the artifacts to leave with.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
Open prompt - Intermediate
Detailed Postmortem Document Generator Prompt
Generate a complete, publication-ready postmortem document from raw incident data — narrative timeline, impact quantification, contributing factors, and tracked action items in a consistent template.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
Open prompt - Beginner
Postmortem to Knowledge Base Article Prompt
Transform an internal postmortem into a polished, shareable knowledge-base article or engineering blog post — preserving the durable lessons while stripping sensitive details and adding context for a wider audience.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
Open prompt - Beginner
Incident Postmortem Drafter Prompt
Convert raw incident notes, Slack threads, and timelines into a blameless postmortem draft.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
Open prompt
Guides
- · 11 min read
Building a Searchable Postmortem Knowledge Base and Trend Report With AI
Postmortems rot in folders nobody searches. Here's how to build a searchable postmortem knowledge base and a quarterly trend report with AI that surfaces real patterns.
Read guide - · 10 min read
Choosing the Right Postmortem Format for the Incident With AI
Not every incident deserves a five-whys. Here's how to pick narrative, timeline, 5-whys, or contributing-factors postmortems—and how AI drafts the right one fast.
Read guide - · 11 min read
Counterfactual Analysis in Postmortems: What Would Have Caught This Sooner
The best postmortem question is 'what would have caught this sooner?' Here's how to run counterfactual analysis with AI to turn incidents into real detection wins.
Read guide - · 10 min read
From Postmortem to Well-Scoped Engineering Tickets With AI
Postmortem action items die as vague one-liners. Here's how to turn a postmortem into well-scoped Jira or GitHub tickets with AI that actually get picked up and shipped.
Read guide - · 11 min read
Multi-Team Incident Postmortems: Untangling Contributing Factors With AI
Cross-team outages produce finger-pointing postmortems. Here's how to untangle contributing factors across service boundaries with AI—and keep the review blameless.
Read guide - · 10 min read
Postmortem QA: Using AI to Catch Missing Sections and Unsupported Claims
Before a postmortem ships, run QA on it. Here's how AI catches missing sections, unsupported claims, and unaddressed single points of failure—without overruling you.
Read guide - · 11 min read
Quantifying Customer and Business Impact in a Postmortem With AI
Vague impact kills postmortem prioritization. Here's how to compute affected users, error-budget burn, SLA credits, and dollars with AI doing the tedious math.
Read guide - · 10 min read
Sanitizing a Postmortem for Public or Cross-Customer Sharing With AI
Sharing a postmortem externally without leaking secrets is fiddly. Here's how to anonymize and sanitize a postmortem with AI while keeping the lessons intact.
Read guide - · 9 min read
Writing the What Went Well Section of a Postmortem With AI
Postmortems that are only failure lists teach teams to hide. Here's how to write an honest what-went-well section, with AI surfacing the saves from the timeline.
Read guide - · 10 min read
Finding Systemic Themes Across Postmortems With AI
One postmortem fixes one bug. Use AI to read across dozens of postmortems and surface the systemic patterns that keep generating incidents in the first place.
Read guide - · 10 min read
Writing External RCA Reports for Enterprise Customers With AI
Enterprise customers demand RCA reports after outages. Learn how to write a credible external root cause analysis fast, with AI drafting and humans owning every word.
Read guide - · 10 min read
Reconstructing an Incident Timeline From Chat Logs With AI
The timeline is the spine of every postmortem and the part everyone dreads. Here's how to use AI to rebuild it from messy chat logs without inventing facts.
Read guide - · 9 min read
Turning a Postmortem Into Action Items With AI (That Actually Get Done)
Most postmortems generate action items that quietly die. Here's how to use AI to extract sharp, ownable, trackable follow-ups that actually get done.
Read guide - · 9 min read
Writing an Internal Incident Review With AI (For Engineers, Not Execs)
Exec updates and engineer reviews need opposite things. Here's how to use AI to draft the deep technical incident review engineers learn from.
Read guide - · 8 min read
Running Incident Retrospectives: A Facilitator's Template
Writing the postmortem doc is the easy part. Running the meeting where the team actually learns is the hard part. Here's a facilitator's playbook.
Read guide - · 9 min read
How to Write a Blameless Postmortem That People Actually Read
A blameless postmortem is only useful if it changes behavior. Here's a veteran SRE's template, facilitation tips, and how AI helps draft without flattening the nuance.
Read guide