What makes a post-mortem "blameless"?

A blameless post-mortem focuses on systems and conditions, not individuals. The goal is to find why the incident was possible and prevent recurrence, so people report honestly instead of hiding mistakes.

Why are AI incidents different?

AI incidents add failure modes classic ops lacks — prompt injection, training-data leakage, hallucinated outputs reaching users, and model regressions after a silent provider update. The template includes sections for these.

Does this submit anything anywhere?

No. The template is generated entirely in your browser from your inputs. Nothing is sent to a server, so you can document sensitive incidents safely.

How detailed should the timeline be?

Capture every relevant event with timestamps — first occurrence, detection, escalation, mitigation, and resolution. The gap between occurrence and detection is often the most important number in the whole report.

What goes in detection-gap analysis?

Document why the incident was not caught sooner — missing alert, no monitoring on that path, alert fired but was ignored, or no test covered it. Each gap becomes a concrete prevention action.

AI Incident Post-Mortem Template

AI incident post-mortem template

When an AI system leaks data, follows an injected instruction, or ships a harmful output, the worst response is an ad-hoc Slack thread that fades by Friday. A structured, blameless post-mortem turns the incident into durable prevention. This tool generates a ready-to-fill template tailored to AI-specific incidents — prompt injection, data exposure, harmful generation, model regression — so you capture the right things while memory is fresh.

How it works

You choose the incident type, list the affected systems, and note how it was discovered. The tool assembles a Markdown post-mortem skeleton with the standard sections — summary, impact, timeline, contributing factors, detection-gap analysis, remediation, and prevention — plus AI-specific prompts seeded from your inputs (for example, “was untrusted input able to reach a tool?” for an injection incident). You copy the Markdown into your own incident document and fill in the real detail. Everything runs locally in the browser.

Tips for a useful post-mortem

Lead with the detection gap. The time between occurrence and detection is usually the highest-leverage metric — every prevention action should shorten it.
Contributing factors are plural. Real incidents are never one cause; list every condition that had to be true, then address the cheapest ones first.
Make actions owned and dated. A remediation list without an owner and a due date is a wish list. The template includes columns for both.
Stay blameless. Write “the deploy had no canary” not “X forgot the canary”. Honest reporting is worth more than assigning blame.