AI-introduced defect incident runbook
Extends the standard incident flow with the RAPID fork: when a defect is found, ask "was this AI-generated?" — and if so, fix the class, not just the instance.
The fork
- Standard incident response — contain, mitigate, restore (per SRE/ITIL).
- "Was this AI-generated?" — check the provenance trail.
- If yes — blast-radius query: what else did this agent / prompt / skill build? The provenance trail turns one defect into a query over everything that shares its origin.
- Patch the source: fix the offending prompt, skill, guardrail or standard so the defect class cannot recur — not just this instance.
- Deposit the capital: regression test, gotcha, and a blameless post-incident summary (templates).
Why this is different from a normal incident
A human-written bug is usually one bug. An AI-generated bug may be a pattern — the same flawed prompt or skill could have produced the same mistake in a dozen places. The blast-radius query and the fix-the-source step are what stop a systematic defect from being patched one-by-one forever.
Standards referenced: NIST SP 800-61, blameless postmortems.