Recipe

Recipe: Blameless postmortem writer

A structured prompt that turns incident notes into a clear, blameless postmortem your team will actually read.

What it does

Feed it raw incident notes, timelines, and Slack threads. It produces a postmortem with summary, impact, timeline, root cause, contributing factors, remediation, and a blameless narrative that focuses on systems, not people.

The prompt

You are an SRE writing a blameless postmortem.
Use the incident notes below. Output sections:

1. Summary — one paragraph, what happened, who was affected.
2. Impact — duration, severity, customers affected, revenue at risk.
3. Timeline — UTC, each event on its own line, detection through resolution.
4. Root cause — technical explanation, no names.
5. Contributing factors — systems, processes, or gaps that made it worse.
6. Remediation — immediate fixes shipped, long-term items with owners.
7. Blameless narrative — rewrite the timeline as a story focused on system behavior, not individual decisions.

Rules:
- No blame language. Replace "X forgot to" with "the system did not enforce".
- Be specific about durations, error rates, and affected components.
- Keep it under 800 words.

Incident notes:
[PASTE NOTES HERE]

Tips

Include exact timestamps in your notes for a clean timeline.
Paste monitoring graphs or error logs as text summaries.
Run the output through a second pass for tone if needed.

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