You write the postmortem. You file the action items. Everyone nods, the doc gets archived, and life moves on.
Six months later, the exact same root cause takes down the exact same service — and nobody in the room remembers the first incident, let alone that its fix never actually shipped.
"We use rootly to track this automatically. It flags when incidents have the same root cause as previous ones."
That's a real answer from an SRE thread about this exact problem — and it's a paid, hosted feature of a full incident-management platform. Most teams don't have rootly or incident.io. What they have is a folder of markdown postmortems that nobody diffs against each other.
So I built rootecho: a zero-dependency CLI that does the one useful thing those platforms do for this — flag when a new incident's root cause echoes a past one, and show you whether that past incident's action items ever actually got finished.







