Production Incident Timeline skill for Claude and Codex

Production Incident Timeline as an AI skill. It asks for Incident name and date, Logs and alerts, Chat transcript and 3 more, then does the rest. Free to…

Install it once and Claude or Codex runs it for you. When your request matches, your AI loads the skill, asks for anything it is missing, and works through the template itself. Prefer to fill it in by hand? See the full prompt template.

Download the skill (.zip) · View SKILL.md

When it is used

Use when an engineer or incident lead has scattered logs, alerts, and chat from an outage and needs one ordered timeline that shows when it really began. Do not use for writing the full post-mortem or fixing the underlying bug. Related topics: devops, communication.

What it will ask you for

• Incident name and date (free text, e.g. "Short label and day")
• Logs and alerts (longer free text)
• Chat transcript (longer free text)
• Deploys and config changes nearby (longer free text)
• Timezone of the sources (free text, e.g. "UTC")
• Customer impact known (longer free text)

How it works

1. Normalise all timestamps to one timezone and flag sources with suspicious clocks.
2. Build a table of time, event, source, and actor covering detection, escalation, hypotheses, mitigation, and resolution.
3. Trace the logs backward from the first alert to find and mark the first bad signal.
4. Compute time to detect, mitigate, and resolve.
5. Separate facts from inferences, mark evidence gaps, and list open questions.

What you get

A timeline table, the first bad signal with its evidence, the three time metrics, a facts versus inferences list, and open questions.

What it watches out for

• Mixing timezones, which makes the cause appear to follow the effect.
• Treating the first alert as the start, when the first bad signal came earlier.
• Stating inferences as facts and handing the team a false root cause.

How to install

Claude.ai and the Claude desktop app

1. Download the skill .zip.
2. Open Settings, then Capabilities, and find Skills.
3. Choose Upload skill and select the .zip.
4. Ask Claude for help with the task. It loads the skill when your request matches.

Claude Code

1. Download the skill .zip.
2. Unzip it into ~/.claude/skills/ (or .claude/skills/ inside a project).
3. Start a new session. Claude Code loads the skill when your request matches.

Codex

1. Download the skill .zip.
2. Unzip it into ~/.agents/skills/ (or .agents/skills/ inside a project).
3. Codex picks it up on its own. Type $ and the skill name to use it, or just ask for the task.

Cursor

1. Download the Cursor rule (.mdc).
2. Save it in .cursor/rules/ inside your project.
3. Cursor's agent applies the rule when your request matches its description.

AGENTS.md (Codex, Cursor, and other coding agents)

1. Copy the AGENTS.md section.
2. Paste it into AGENTS.md at the root of your repository, creating the file if needed.
3. Coding agents that read AGENTS.md follow it when your request fits.