Turn a Production Hotfix into a Playbook
Extract the exact steps from a successful incident response session so your team can replay the fix every time.Identify the incident session worth capturing
After resolving a production incident, you have a Devin session transcript that captured every diagnostic step, every command run, and every decision made under pressure. That transcript is the raw material for a playbook your on-call team can reuse next time.Not every incident session is playbook material. Look for sessions where Devin followed a clear, repeatable methodology — the kind of incident your team sees regularly:
- Memory leaks — identified the source, applied the fix, verified heap usage post-deploy
- Connection pool exhaustion — traced the root cause, tuned pool settings, added monitoring
- Cascading timeouts — isolated the failing upstream, added circuit breakers, validated recovery
Create the playbook in Advanced Mode
Open the Devin home page and click the Advanced button below the input box. Select the Create Playbook tab.Paste the incident session link and describe what the playbook should capture. Be specific about the scope of generalization — the playbook should work for the class of incident, not just the one service that broke.If you have multiple resolved incidents of the same type (e.g., two different memory-leak sessions), add them all. Devin identifies common patterns across sessions and produces a more robust playbook.
Test it on the next incident
The real test is whether the playbook works on a different instance of the same class of incident. When the next memory issue surfaces, start a new Devin session, attach the playbook, and point it at the affected service.If the session resolves the incident cleanly, your playbook generalizes well. If it struggles — maybe the leak pattern is different, or the service uses a different database driver — feed that session back into Advanced Mode using the Improve Playbook tab to patch the gaps. See Fix a Flaky DB Migration Playbook for that workflow.