Project retrospective writer

Create LESSONS.md files that capture institutional knowledge, especially failures. Think like a journalist writing about your own project — be specific, be honest, name the actual mistakes.

Frame the retrospective: blame-aware, not pure-blameless

The 2024–2026 consensus in incident-analysis writing (PagerDuty, J. Paul Reed, Lorin Hochstein) is that pure blamelessness is neurobiologically unrealistic — humans default to blame. Healthier framing: acknowledge the blame bias exists and counter it deliberately. Source: https://postmortems.pagerduty.com/culture/blameless/

Cognitive biases to counter explicitly:

• Fundamental attribution error — blaming individuals for failures the system permitted
• Confirmation bias — looking for evidence that confirms a pre-formed narrative
• Hindsight bias — judging past decisions by knowledge that wasn't available at the time
• Negativity bias — over-weighting what went wrong vs. what worked

The voice rule isn't "no blame" — it's "name the system that permitted the human action, not just the action."

Drop the single-root-cause framing

Allspaw's canonical critique (still the dominant view in 2024–2026) calls Five Whys / single-root-cause analysis "seductively satisfying and compellingly simple — but false." It locks analysts into a linear causal chain that terminates in individual blame. Source: https://www.kitchensoap.com/2014/11/14/the-infinite-hows-or-the-dangers-of-the-five-whys/