incident-response

A guide for handling a production incident, meaning a serious problem affecting a live service or its users, from first report through follow-up review.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to start and triage an incident, assign response roles, draft status updates, and write a postmortem after the issue is resolved.
Why use it?
It gives the team a structured way to assess impact, coordinate responders, communicate updates, and learn from the failure without blaming individuals.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the engineering plugin — 10 skills shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins/incident-response
Any agent
npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill incident-response
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills.

Per session 60 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,121 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00060 $0.01121
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00561
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00224
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00112

Measured 3d ago against content hash 9eaa7a974c90, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

incident-response scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

engineering/skills/incident-response/SKILL.md · 159 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 159 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/incident-response

If you see unfamiliar placeholders or need to check which tools are connected, see CONNECTORS.md.

Manage an incident from detection through postmortem.

Usage

/incident-response $ARGUMENTS

Modes

/incident-response new [description]     # Start a new incident
/incident-response update [status]       # Post a status update
/incident-response postmortem            # Generate postmortem from incident data

If no mode is specified, ask what phase the incident is in.

How It Works

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    INCIDENT RESPONSE                               │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Phase 1: TRIAGE                                                  │
│  ✓ Assess severity (SEV1-4)                                     │
│  ✓ Identify affected systems and users                          │
│  ✓ Assign roles (IC, comms, responders)                         │
│                                                                    │
│  Phase 2: COMMUNICATE                                              │
│  ✓ Draft internal status update                                  │
│  ✓ Draft customer communication (if needed)                     │
│  ✓ Set up war room and cadence                                   │
│                                                                    │
│  Phase 3: MITIGATE                                                 │
│  ✓ Document mitigation steps taken                               │
│  ✓ Track timeline of events                                      │
│  ✓ Confirm resolution                                            │
│                                                                    │
│  Phase 4: POSTMORTEM                                               │
│  ✓ Blameless postmortem document                                 │
│  ✓ Timeline reconstruction                                       │
│  ✓ Root cause analysis (5 whys)                                  │
│  ✓ Action items with owners                                      │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Read the full file on GitHub · 159 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 159 lines · 60 tokens per session scan A 9eaa7a974c90

Subscribe to this mod's changes

incident-response is a skill published in the GitHub repository anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins (23,791 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 1,121 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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