Purpose

Standardize postmortem creation so engineering and reliability teams can rapidly document learnings and accountability.

Pre-run Checklist

• ✅ Gather incident alerts, logs, and chat transcripts.
• ✅ Confirm timeline with responders.
• ✅ Align on severity classification and stakeholders.

Invocation Guidance

codex run --skill optimization.postmortem \
  --vars "incident_summary={{incident_summary}}" \
         "impact_scope={{impact_scope}}" \
         "duration={{duration}}" \
         "mitigation_steps={{mitigation_steps}}"

Recommended Input Attachments

• Incident timeline exports (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Slack).
• Monitoring dashboards or screenshots.
• Customer communications sent during the incident.

Claude Workflow Outline

1. Summarize incident context, severity, impact, and timeline.
2. Detail sequence of events with timestamps and decision points.
3. Perform root cause analysis using techniques like 5 Whys or fishbone.
4. Document detection gaps and monitoring improvements.
5. Provide corrective and preventive actions with owners and deadlines.

Output Template

# Postmortem — {{incident_summary}}

## Impact & Timeline
- Severity:
- Impact Scope:
- Duration:
| Time | Event | Owner | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |

## Root Cause Analysis
- Primary Cause:
- Contributing Factors:
- Detection Gaps:

## Corrective Actions
| Action | Owner | Due Date | Status |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |

## Preventive Measures
- Monitoring Updates:
- Process Improvements:
- Follow-up Reviews:

Follow-up Actions

• Review postmortem in reliability or engineering forums.
• Track actions in the incident management system.
• Schedule follow-up to verify preventive measures are in place.