blameless-postmortem
Google SRE-style blameless postmortem authoring. Structure, timeline construction, contributing-factor extraction, action-item discipline, and the cultural practices that make postmortems produce learning rather than theater. Use when writing a postmortem after an incident, reviewing a draft postmortem, running a postmortem review meeting, building a postmortem template, or teaching a team how to write postmortems that actually improve the system. Complements rca-human-factors (for the "why people did what they did" analysis) and the rca-classical-methods / rca-systems-theoretic / rca-causal-i
npx skills add majiayu000/claude-skill-registry --skill blameless-postmortem --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# Blameless Postmortems A postmortem is the work product that converts an incident from a surprise into learning. A *blameless* postmortem does this without punishing the people closest to the incident — not because punishment is wrong in principle, but because punishment destroys the reporting culture that makes further learning possible. This skill teaches you how to write one. ## The two purposes of a postmortem 1. **Learning** — teach the organization something it didn't know about itself, so the same incident or its close cousins don't recur. 2. **Accountability** — commit the organization to a specific set of changes with owners and deadlines. These are not competing purposes. They are complementary: learning without accountability is a reading exercise; accountability without learning is theater. A postmortem that fails either purpose is a bad postmortem, regardless of how polished it looks. ## Why "blameless"? Google's SRE book (Beyer et al., 2016, Chapter 15) articulates the principle: *you cannot fix what you cannot see, and people will not show you what they did if they believe they will be punished for it*. Blameless postmortems are a deliberate organizational choice to
- The two purposes of a postmortem
- Why "blameless"?
- What blameless is not
- The Google SRE postmortem template
- 1. Title
- 2. Status
- 3. Summary
- 4. Impact
- 5. Timeline
- 6. Root cause and contributing factors
- 7. Resolution
- 8. Lessons learned
- 9. Action items
- Action item discipline
What does the blameless-postmortem skill do?
Google SRE-style blameless postmortem authoring. Structure, timeline construction, contributing-factor extraction, action-item discipline, and the cultural practices that make postmortems produce learning rather than theater. Use when writing a postmortem after an incident, reviewing a draft postmortem, running a postmortem review meeting, building a postmortem template, or teaching a team how to write postmortems that actually improve the system. Complements rca-human-factors (for the "why people did what they did" analysis) and the rca-classical-methods / rca-systems-theoretic / rca-causal-i
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add majiayu000/claude-skill-registry --skill blameless-postmortem --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From majiayu000/claude-skill-registry, a repository with 534 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.