runbook

Create or Update Runbook

Operating Principles

• YAGNI applies to runbooks themselves. Apply the evidence-based YAGNI rule from ../../references/yagni-rule.md. A runbook is worth writing only when the scenario is grounded in something real: an alert that has actually fired, a documented incident, a recurring task that exists, or a known failure mode on a service that receives production traffic. Runbooks for hypothetical alerts, "best practice says we should have one," or "we'll need this someday" are YAGNI candidates and the runbook should be deferred until the scenario actually occurs. The canonical anti-pattern from project history: Sentry runbooks for staging-only Sentry where data isn't reaching production — alerts that will never fire because no signal flows. The user always wins; the rule's job is to make the cost of speculative runbooks visible.
• The companion evidence rule applies to the runbook's supporting evidence. Apply the evidence rule from ../../references/evidence-rule.md to the citations that ground the scenario: name the trust class of each piece of evidence (alert history, incident report, on-call rotation pattern); cite the actual artifact (dashboard URL, ticket ID, log query) rather than paraphrased recollection; and surface single-source claims as such rather than presenting them as settled.
• One runbook per invocation. The skill produces a single runbook file. Multi-runbook batches conflate scope; rerun the skill per scenario.
• Imperative commands with expected output. The template requires every step to show the exact command and what success looks like. Prose paragraphs in place of commands are an authoring failure the skill prompts against.
• Staleness is the failure mode. The template requires owner, last-validated, last-edited, and a change-history entry so decay is visible rather than hidden. The skill does not enforce a review cadence — that is a team-level workflow concern — but the metadata fields make the cadence auditable.
• Readability standard. Source the standard by invoking han-communication:readability-guidance and apply it as you write the runbook. Hold its default audience frame: a capable reader who did not do this work and lacks the author's context — here, the operator following the runbook during an incident.