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postmortem-writing

Write effective blameless postmortems with root cause analysis, timelines, and action items. Use when conducting incident reviews, writing postmortem documents, or improving incident response processes.

65

Quality

82%

Does it follow best practices?

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SecuritybySnyk

Passed

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SKILL.md
Quality
Evals
Security

Quality

Content

71%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.

The body delivers highly actionable, copy-paste-ready templates and a clear process timeline, but underperforms on organization: two full templates are inlined despite the skill itself declaring that the template library lives in references/details.md, and the worked example duplicates content in that reference. Trimming the generic best-practice tables and moving the inline templates into the reference would resolve most issues.

Suggestions

Move Template 2 (5 Whys) and Template 3 (Quick Postmortem) into references/details.md and renumber consistently, keeping only a one-line pointer to each template in the body — this fixes both the progressive disclosure overlap and the confusing Template 1/2/3 split.

Remove the duplicated worked example: the body's 5-Whys payment-outage incident is the same incident fully worked in references/details.md; keep it in one place only.

Trim the blame/blameless table, anti-patterns table, and Do's/Don'ts sections, which restate widely known postmortem practice — retain only the team-specific triggers and norms Claude would not already infer.

DimensionReasoningScore

Conciseness

The body is mostly efficient but padded in places: the blame/blameless table, anti-patterns table, and Do's/Don'ts largely restate postmortem practice Claude already knows, and Template 2's 5-Whys worked example duplicates the same payment/DB-connection incident fully worked in references/details.md. Not 4 because the duplication and generic-advice sections are noticeable, not minor.

3 / 5

Actionability

Guidance is copy-paste ready: Template 2 is a fully worked 5-Whys analysis with per-step evidence, Template 3 is a complete quick-postmortem format, and the facilitation guide gives a time-boxed 60-minute meeting structure — covering the common major and minor cases.

5 / 5

Workflow Clarity

The Day 0–7 timeline and the sequenced meeting structure give a clear process order, and follow-up verification appears in the Don'ts. Not 5 because there are no explicit checkpoints or feedback loops between draft, review, and finalize stages; not 3 because the sequence itself is well defined.

4 / 5

Progressive Disclosure

The reference to references/details.md is clearly signaled and one level deep, but two full templates (~90 lines) that belong in that reference are inlined anyway, and the numbering is incoherent — the body shows Templates 2 and 3 while Template 1 exists only in the reference file. This matches the 'content that should be separate is inline' anchor; not 4 because the inline duplication is substantial rather than a minor gap.

3 / 5

Total

15

/

20

Passed

Description

83%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.

A strong description that clearly and concisely states what the skill does and when to use it, in third person with natural trigger phrases. Gaps are minor: meeting facilitation is unmentioned and a few common synonyms (e.g., retrospective) would improve trigger coverage.

DimensionReasoningScore

Specificity

Names the domain and several concrete actions ("root cause analysis, timelines, and action items"), matching the 'several specific actions; minor gaps' anchor. Not 5 because facilitating postmortem meetings — a substantial portion of the skill — is not mentioned in the description.

4 / 5

Completeness

Explicitly answers both questions in third person: what ("Write effective blameless postmortems with root cause analysis, timelines, and action items") and when ("Use when conducting incident reviews, writing postmortem documents, or improving incident response processes") — a clear match for the 5 anchor.

5 / 5

Trigger Term Quality

"conducting incident reviews", "writing postmortem documents", "improving incident response" are natural user phrases with good coverage, matching the 4 anchor. Not 5 because common variations like "retrospective", "post-mortem", or bare "incident" are missing.

4 / 5

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

The postmortem/incident-review niche is mostly distinct with specific triggers. Not 5 because "improving incident response processes" is broad enough to overlap with incident-response or runbook skills.

4 / 5

Total

17

/

20

Passed

Validation

100%

Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.

Validation — 16 / 16 Passed

Validation for skill structure

No warnings or errors.

Repository

wshobson/agents

Path

plugins/incident-response/skills/postmortem-writing/SKILL.md

Reviewed

Table of Contents

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