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 what you write in the next hour is going to be read by engineers, product managers, and probably a VP or two. It needs to be clear, blameless, specific, and actionable. Most of us write it badly. Not because we're bad at our jobs — because we're human beings who just spent two hours firefighting and now we're staring at a blank document at 3am trying to remember the exact sequence of events. There's a better way. The Problem With How We Write Postmortems The standard postmortem template is a solved problem. Every company has one. Timeline, root cause, contributing factors, action items — we all know the structure. The hard part isn't the structure. It's the writing. Specifically: Reconstructing the timeline from a chaotic Slack thread where half the messages are noise Writing the root cause narrative in plain language when your brain is still in technical mode Generating action items that are actually specific and assignable instead of vague gestures toward improvement Translating all of it into an executive summary that a non-technical VP can understand without losing the technical accuracy Each of these is a hard writing task under normal circumstances. At 2am after an incident they're brutal. What Changed for Me I started treating postmortem writing like any other repetitive engineering task: I built a system for it. Specifically, I built a set of AI prompts designed for the exact scenarios SREs face. Not generic "write me a postmortem" prompts — structured prompts that work with the raw material you actually have in front of you at the end of an incident. The key insight w