After-Action Review Tool for Engineering Teams
AAR Maker runs structured after-action reviews: the incident and post-launch review I used to facilitate in person, now software a team runs on its own cadence. Each review becomes an artefact the team keeps learning from, with the discipline a good facilitator brings to the room. I built and shipped it into a 25+ team organisation; of my three tools there, it’s the one that needed an LLM. The teams there still run most of their reviews through it, months after I left.
“[AAR Maker] turns a meeting Chris used to facilitate into a structured artifact the team produces continuously. Conservatively saves hundreds of engineering hours a year.”
Christophe Louvion, CTO
How a review runs
A review moves the way a good facilitator would take you: build the timeline, find the contributing factors, and map each one to where it actually lives, whether that’s strategy, structure, process, rewards, or people. When the answer is “someone missed a step,” it asks what made that step easy to miss. You come out with a short list of actions, each rated by relative urgency, so the team fixes the constraint instead of trying to fix everything at once.
Blameless by default
Most of what goes wrong is systemic, not personal (Deming), so “who missed it” becomes “what made this outcome likely.” When someone made a call that looks wrong in hindsight, the tool asks what made it seem right at the time.Dekker’s local rationality. Fair accountability, without blame, is the only way people tell you what actually happened.
1 Dekker’s local rationality.
What the team keeps
Every review is a durable artefact, not a meeting that evaporates. Run enough of them and the tool reads across the whole set for the patterns a single review can’t see: the gaps in how the organisation is set up that keep generating the same incident. With your tools connected, it pulls the bug and timeline evidence in and writes the action items back out as tickets, so the follow-through has somewhere to land.
The retrieval architecture underneath is open source at github.com/chrisgagne/grounded-forge.