Production Incident Post-Mortem
Turns an incident timeline into a blameless post-mortem that separates trigger from cause from contributing conditions, with actions that are actually assigned.
Free — no card needed
Create a free account
to open Production Incident Post-Mortem — and the other 364 prompts across 21 categories.
Already have an account?
Running it, start to finish
- Reconstruct the timeline from logs with real timestamps.
- Push the why-chain in section 3 until you reach something structural.
- Cut the action list to the ones with a real owner and a real date.
What you get back
The output this produces, every time.
- Separates trigger from cause, and pushes past human error to the system that allowed it to matter.
- Adds what-we-believed against what-was-true to the timeline, which is where response time is actually lost.
- Sorts actions into prevent/detect/mitigate/respond and flags the ones nobody will really do.
Getting better results
Where this usually goes wrong, and how to avoid it.
- Write the timeline from logs. not memory, then annotate it with what people believed. Memory reliably compresses the confused period, which is the part worth studying.
- Distrust an all-prevent action list. It means the analysis over-fitted to this incident. The detect and mitigate actions are what pay off on the next, different failure.
- Keep section 5. even when it feels awkward. Whatever contained the damage is load-bearing, and load-bearing things get removed when nobody knows they are.
More Coding prompts
All Coding →- Coding
Review for the Bug, Not the Style
A code review that hunts correctness failures and states the exact input that breaks each one, instead of listing naming preferences.
ClaudeChatGPTGemini000Open → - Coding
Database Migration Plan
Plans a schema change that ships without downtime, in steps that are each independently safe and reversible.
ClaudeChatGPT000Open → - Coding
Refactor With a Safety Net
Plans a refactor as a sequence of individually safe, individually shippable steps, with the characterisation tests that make each one verifiable.
ClaudeChatGPT000Open →
Written for The AI University. Every prompt in this library is original work — authored, tested and revised here, not collected from elsewhere. 365 of them, free with an account.