AI Postmortem

Postmortem

Purpose

Structured incident postmortem using the DERP model. Guides through Detection, Escalation, Recovery, and Prevention phases with targeted questions. Produces blameless, actionable postmortem documents.

Trigger

• Command: /ai-postmortem start|continue|find|generate
• Context: incident occurred, production failure, outage resolution, near-miss analysis.

Modes

start -- New postmortem

1. Assign ID -- generate PM-YYYY-NNN (sequential within year).
2. Set status -- draft.
3. Scaffold -- create .ai-engineering/postmortems/{id}.md with DERP template.
4. Interview -- Detection:
   • When was the incident first detected?
   • How was it detected? (monitoring, user report, manual discovery)
   • What was the time between incident start and detection?
   • What monitoring should have caught it earlier?
5. Interview -- Escalation:
   • Who was notified and when?
   • Was the escalation path appropriate?
   • Were the right people involved at the right time?
6. Interview -- Recovery:
   • What actions were taken to restore service?
   • What was the total downtime/impact duration?
   • Was there a rollback? What was the rollback procedure?
7. Interview -- Prevention:
   • Root cause (use 5-Whys if needed)
   • What changes prevent recurrence?
   • Action items with owners and deadlines

Ask ONE section at a time. Wait for answers before proceeding to the next DERP phase.

continue -- Resume postmortem

1. Load -- read .ai-engineering/postmortems/{id}.md.
2. Find gap -- identify the first incomplete DERP section.
3. Resume interview -- continue from the incomplete section.

find [query] -- Search postmortems

1. Search -- scan .ai-engineering/postmortems/*.md for matching content.
2. List -- show ID, title, date, status, and root cause summary.

generate -- Create from existing notes

1. Collect -- gather incident-related commits, PRs, Slack threads, and notes from context.
2. Draft -- populate DERP sections from available data, mark gaps as [NEEDS INPUT].
3. Review -- present draft for user validation before saving.

Document Template

# {id}: {title}

**Date**: YYYY-MM-DD
**Status**: draft | in-review | complete
**Severity**: SEV-1 | SEV-2 | SEV-3
**Duration**: {total impact time}

## Detection
{How and when the incident was discovered}

## Escalation
{Notification chain and response timeline}

## Recovery
{Steps taken to restore service}

## Prevention
### Root Cause
{5-Whys analysis}

### Action Items
| # | Action | Owner | Deadline | Status |
|---|--------|-------|----------|--------|

## Timeline
| Time | Event |
|------|-------|

Status Progression

draft -> in-review (all DERP sections complete) -> complete (action items assigned)

Quick Reference

/ai-postmortem start                  # begin new postmortem
/ai-postmortem continue PM-2026-001   # resume in-progress postmortem
/ai-postmortem find database           # search past postmortems
/ai-postmortem generate               # generate from existing context

Storage

• Location: .ai-engineering/postmortems/{id}.md
• ID format: PM-YYYY-NNN

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