How I Write Postmortems in 5 Minutes Using AI (And Why Most SREs Are Doing It the Hard Way)
Originally published on Medium It's 2:51am. The incident is resolved. Error rate is back to zero, the rollback worked, and your on-call pager has finally gone quiet. Now you have to write the postmortem. If you've been in SRE or DevOps for any length of time, you know this feeling. You're exhausted, your brain is running on adrenaline fumes, and somewhere in the back of your mind you know that…
At 2:51am the incident is resolved and the on-call pager goes quiet. The reporter, exhausted from firefighting, now must write a postmortem that will be read by engineers, product managers, and possibly a VP. The standard template isn't the issue; it's the writing process. The reporter found success by treating postmortem writing like any other repetitive engineering task, creating AI prompts tailored to the specific scenarios SREs encounter.
The key is providing the AI with the raw material from the incident and clearly defining the desired format and constraints. This approach significantly reduces the time needed to write a comprehensive, blameless postmortem, from hours to just a few minutes.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
