Postmortems¶
What went wrong + what changed because of it. Frozen documents — once written, they're not edited (a follow-up postmortem can supersede if the same thing happens again).
When to write one¶
After:
- An incident in production
- A piece of work being rejected and needing rework
- A bug that took longer than expected to find
- Any class of mistake worth not repeating
Postmortems are about systems, not blame. The format steers toward "what was true about the situation that made this likely" rather than "who screwed up."
Conventions¶
- Dated filenames:
2026-04-26-v01-prototype-rejected.md - Write soon after the incident, while details are fresh
- Include: timeline, root cause, contributing factors, what we changed, what we deliberately didn't change
Index¶
| Date | Title | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-26 | v0.1 prototype rejected — "AI slop" → full rebuild | High |