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Part VI — Practical Vibe Coding Workflows (The Stuff You'll Actually Use Daily)/19. Vibe Coding for Debugging & Incident Response/19.4 Postmortems: writing a useful incident report
19.4 Postmortems: writing a useful incident report
Overview and links for this section of the guide.
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Goal: convert an incident into learning
A good postmortem is not paperwork. It’s how you prevent recurrence and improve systems over time.
The goal is to capture:
- what happened (timeline),
- impact,
- root cause and contributing factors,
- what worked and what didn’t,
- follow-ups that reduce future risk.
Postmortems are a reliability feature
Teams that write good postmortems get faster and calmer over time. Teams that don’t repeat the same incidents with different symptoms.
Postmortem principles (blameless, specific, actionable)
- Blameless: focus on system causes, not individual fault.
- Specific: concrete times, metrics, diffs, and outcomes.
- Actionable: follow-ups have owners and deadlines.
- Truthful: include uncertainty where it exists; don’t invent a narrative.
Incident report template
Incident title:
Summary (3–6 sentences):
Impact:
- Who was affected:
- What was affected:
- Duration:
- Severity:
Timeline (UTC):
- T0: detection
- ...
- Resolution
Root cause:
Contributing factors:
- ...
Detection:
- How did we notice?
- Which alerts/logs/metrics?
Resolution:
- What changed?
- Verification steps:
What went well:
- ...
What went poorly:
- ...
Action items:
- [ ] Action (owner, due date)
- [ ] ...How to use the model to draft (safely)
LLMs are useful for drafting postmortems because they can organize messy notes quickly. Use them safely:
- paste redacted notes (no secrets, no PII)
- demand that the model flags uncertainty (“unknown”)
- require a clear separation between facts and hypotheses
- review carefully: the model may invent a clean narrative
Copy-paste prompt
Draft a postmortem using the template below.
Rules:
- Use only the facts I provide.
- If something is unknown, mark it as unknown.
- Do not invent details to make a nicer story.
Facts/notes (redacted):
...
Template:
(paste template)Models like tidy stories
Incidents are messy. A model may invent missing steps to “complete” the story. Force it to mark unknowns instead.
Follow-up actions that actually prevent repeats
High-leverage action categories:
- Tests: regression tests and characterization tests
- Validation: input validation and schema validation
- Observability: add missing logs/metrics and alert thresholds
- Rate limit/caching: reduce retry storms and overload
- Runbooks: document “how to diagnose this class of failure”
Each action item should be concrete and owned.