AI Auditing Tool Aims to Fix the Shallow Root Cause Analysis Plaguing Incident Postmortems

Most incident postmortems fail to identify true root causes, instead stopping at surface-level symptoms and vague timelines that allow the same outages to recur, according to a software reliability engineer. Common pitfalls include treating human error as a root cause, conflating contributing factors with actual causes, and listing unaccountable action items like 'improve monitoring' with no owner or deadline. The author argues that LLM-based summarization of incidents is insufficient, and that what engineering teams actually need is adversarial scrutiny of their investigation logic. To address this, they have been using a tool called the Incident Postmortem Prover, built on the Model Context Protocol, which flags weak reasoning patterns such as incomplete timelines, shallow root causes, and conflated causal factors. The tool is designed to push SREs and engineers toward systemic, fixable conclusions rather than blame-oriented narratives that leave underlying vulnerabilities unresolved.