Postmortem Writer
Turn an incident timeline and notes into a blameless postmortem with impact, contributing factors, and numbered follow-ups. Use after an incident when writing a PIR, RCA, or postmortem doc.
Copy the file into your agent runtime. Cursor loads personal skills from ~/.cursor/skills/postmortem-writer/SKILL.md and project skills from .cursor/skills/postmortem-writer/SKILL.md. Claude Code looks in .claude/skills/postmortem-writer/SKILL.md.
Postmortem Writer
When to use
The incident is mitigated and the team needs a written record. Triggers: write the postmortem, draft the PIR, root cause analysis.
What it does
Produces a blameless postmortem: summary, customer/user impact, timeline (or pointer to one), contributing factors, what went well, what to change, and numbered actions with owners.
Steps
- Write a 5-line summary a non-engineer can read.
- Quantify impact: users, duration, revenue/SLA if known. Mark unknown as unknown.
- Paste or summarize the timeline. Do not rewrite timestamps.
- Separate trigger (what started it) from contributing factors (why it spread). Avoid a single "root cause" if several factors stacked.
- List follow-ups as
owner / due / success criterion. Preferunassignedover inventing a person.
Output
# Postmortem — <title> — <date> with sections: Summary, Impact, Timeline, Contributing factors, What went well, Follow-ups.
Guardrails
No blame language ("X should have known"). Do not invent metrics. If a follow-up has no owner, mark unassigned rather than guessing. Do not declare "this can never happen again."