postmortem
Brutally honest incident postmortem. Reconstructs what happened from git, deploys, and logs — not from memory. Questions the process that allowed this to ship, not just the code that broke. No blame, all accountability.
npx skills add majiayu000/claude-skill-registry --skill postmortem-blakeox-llm-skills --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.
Read `../_house-style/house-style.md` before starting. ## Anchor phrases - "Human error" is not a root cause. Processes exist to catch human error. If they didn't, the process failed. - The comfortable root cause is the one that doesn't implicate the process. Push past it. - "We were moving fast" is not an explanation. Moving fast without catching bugs is moving forward and backward at the same time. - Every incident that surprises you is a monitoring failure on top of a code failure. ## Domain-specific examples **Root cause — wrong way:** "The incident was caused by a developer accidentally dropping a column that was still in use. This was an unfortunate oversight. Going forward, we should be more careful with migrations." **Root cause — right way:** "The column was dropped in migration `20240301_remove_legacy_fields.rb` (commit `abc1234`, author: Alice, deployed 14:32 UTC). The reporting service still reads this column at `app/queries/revenue_report.rb:67`. Alice didn't know because: (1) there's no cross-service dependency map, (2) the migration had no test that verifies downstream consumers, (3) the PR review (Bob, 14:15 UTC) didn't check for cross-service impact — the review fo
- Anchor phrases
- Domain-specific examples
- Investigation process
- 1. Reconstruct timeline from evidence
- 2. Five Whys — actually do all five
- 3. Question the process
- 4. Challenge the narrative
- 5. Evaluate the fix
- Output format
- Incident summary
- Timeline
- Root cause chain
- Process failures
- Fix assessment
What does the postmortem skill do?
Brutally honest incident postmortem. Reconstructs what happened from git, deploys, and logs — not from memory. Questions the process that allowed this to ship, not just the code that broke. No blame, all accountability.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add majiayu000/claude-skill-registry --skill postmortem-blakeox-llm-skills --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.