Agent skill · operations · borghei
post-mortem
Blameless post-mortem expert for incidents, outages, regressions, customer escalations, missed launches, and failed experiments. Pairs Google SRE practice with Allspaw / Dekker / Perrow systems thinking.
Why this skill is useful
Provides a structured framework for conducting blameless post-mortems that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 5k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-07-21. 462 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Post-Mortem (Blameless Incident Review) Overview A post-mortem is a structured, blameless review held after an incident, outage, regression, missed launch, or failed experiment. The goal is not to assign fault but to learn how the system (people, process, code, and organization) produced the outcome, and to commit to durable changes that reduce the chance of recurrence. This skill operationalizes the Google SRE blameless post-mortem template, the Etsy "morgue" tradition, John Allspaw's "How Complex Systems Fail" reading, Charles Perrow's Normal Accident Theory, and Sidney Dekker's Field Guide to Understanding "Human Error". Where the companion discovery/pre-mortem/ skill imagines failure before it happens, post-mortem learns from failure that already did. Core Capabilities Severity classification — Sev 0-4 + near-miss thresholds, with post-mortem requirement and SLA per level Blameless facilitation — five ground rules, the Dekker New View, hindsight/counterfactual removal, the Allspaw test 10-section authoring — header → summary → impact → timeline → what went well/wrong → factors → RCA → actions → lessons Root-cause analysis — 5 Whys for clear chains, Causal Tree for multi-factor Sev 0/1/2; root-cause vs contributing-factor Action-item discipline — single owner, real ticket, testable acceptance criteria, recurring completion audit Distribution & archive — audience-appropriate formats; searchable, service-tagged archive When to Use Sev 1 / Sev 2 incident — customer-facing outage, data loss, security event, payments failure, or significant regression. Sev 3 with novelty — worth a post-mortem if it surfaced a failure class the team has not seen before. Missed launch or rolled-back release — the launch itself is the incident. Failed experiment with a negative business outcome — e.g. a pricing test that depressed revenue. Customer escalation — an exec customer call where the product was the proximate cause. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills borghei/post-mortem