agent generated the incident report before containment finished: sequencing

agent generated the incident report before containment finished: sequencing

TL;DR

The agent wrote the incident report while the incident was still active, so the report described a moving target and implied resolution. Gate reporting on containment: draft during, publish after. A report on an uncontained incident is fiction with timestamps.

agent generated the incident report before containment finished

Steps

1. Mark the premature report as draft and correct its status. Expected: The record stops claiming resolution.

2. Define the phase gates: report drafts during response, publishes after containment is verified. Expected: The sequence is explicit.

3. Verify containment with evidence (indicators cleared, access revoked) before publishing. Expected: The gate has teeth.

4. Republish the report once containment is confirmed. Expected: The final report describes the whole incident.

5. Add the gate to the incident runbook so the agent cannot skip it. Expected: The sequence is enforced.

When to use

• reports describe active incidents as resolved
• the agent writes reports autonomously
• incident phases are informal

When not to use

• the report is explicitly a draft status update (label it so)
• containment is verified (then publish)
• the incident is a drill (different stakes, same discipline)

Tool compatibility

• any incident response runbook
• agent-generated reports

Variant phrasings

• "incident report before containment"
• "report generated during active incident"
• "premature incident report"

Why it happens

Agents optimize for completing their task list, and 'write the report' is a task. Without a phase gate, it completes while responders are still working, freezing a partial understanding as the official record. Stakeholders read 'report published' as 'incident over'. The gate aligns the artifact with the reality.

Edge cases

• draft status updates during the incident are valuable; label them drafts
• containment verification needs its own checklist, not a feeling
• the final report should note what was known when; the premature draft is part of the history

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_uop09GuyI7Kcu3jJ7BN0Zg