AI-Written Incident Reports Look Polished But Miss the Messy Truth, Engineer Warns

A software engineer argues that using AI to generate post-mortems after production incidents creates well-formatted but misleading documents that obscure how problems were actually solved. During a recent four-hour outage caused by a cache stampede, the chaotic, human-driven investigation — including a key insight from a senior engineer recalling a similar issue years earlier — was lost when an LLM was handed chat logs and asked to write the review. The AI produced a clean timeline and tidy action items, but failed to capture false starts, coordination failures, and the accidental discovery that led to the fix. The author, who approved the flawed report despite recognizing its shortcomings, contends that post-mortems are a core organizational learning mechanism, not an administrative chore to be automated. Treating them as the latter, the engineer warns, carries the same risk as other surveillance-driven shortcuts in engineering culture: it optimizes for appearance over understanding.