Incident Postmortem Writer skill for Claude and Codex

Incident Postmortem Writer as an AI skill. It asks for Incident summary, Timeline notes, Customer impact and 3 more, then does the rest. Free to install in…

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 outage, bug or near miss has been resolved and the team needs a blameless postmortem with timeline, root cause and owned actions. Do not use for live incident coordination or writing a status page update during an outage. Related topics: devops, communication.

What it will ask you for

• Incident summary (longer free text)
• Timeline notes (longer free text)
• Customer impact (longer free text)
• Severity (choose one: Sev 1, Sev 2, Sev 3, Near miss)
• What the team found (longer free text)
• Audience (choose one: Engineering only, Whole company, Customers)

How it works

1. Draft a three-sentence summary and quantify the impact, labelling any estimates as estimates.
2. Order the raw notes into a single-time-zone timeline and mark detection, response and recovery phases.
3. Trace the cause with repeated why questions until it lands on a process, tooling or design gap, never a person.
4. Record what went well and list contributing factors apart from the root cause.
5. Write actions with an owner, due date, type and done criterion, and match tone and detail to the audience.

What you get

A postmortem document with summary, impact, timeline, root cause, contributing factors, what went well, and an actions table with owner, date, type and done criterion.

What it watches out for

• Stopping at human error, which guarantees the same incident returns with a different person.
• Writing actions like 'be more careful' that cannot be verified or assigned.
• Inventing timestamps to fill gaps in the timeline instead of marking them unknown.

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.