Incident Postmortem skills for AI agents

Communicate with customers during an active incident — status page, email, in-app banners, social media. The engineering decisions are hard but separable from the communications decisions; this skill covers the latter. Use when an incident has customer impact and the question of what to tell them, when, becomes pressing.

Serve as the incident commander during an active production incident. The IC coordinates the response, tracks the status, communicates with stakeholders, and makes the calls. Distinct from the engineers investigating root cause. Use when an incident exceeds what one engineer can handle alone.

Write runbooks the on-call engineer at 03:00 AM can actually follow. Covers structure, decision points, escalation criteria, and the difference between procedural runbooks and diagnostic runbooks. Use when documenting any production system that can fail in ways the primary on-call may not have seen before.

Define a severity scale that triggers the right response without overreaction or underreaction. Covers SEV-1 through SEV-4, the customer-impact criteria, the response expectations per level, and how to handle escalation and de-escalation during an incident. Use when designing or reviewing your team's incident management process.

Write postmortems that turn outages into learning, not blame. Covers the blameless framing, the timeline reconstruction, the contributing-factors analysis, and the action-items discipline. Use after any production incident, near-miss, or significant degradation that the team needs to learn from.