with the skill
Should I use a factual, blameless tone and a short Slack format with sections for impact, timeline, root cause, and follow-ups?
internal-comms
what it does
A set of resources to help me write all kinds of internal communications, using the formats that my company likes to use. Claude should use this skill whenever asked to write some sort of internal communications (status reports, leadership updates, 3P updates, company newsletters, FAQs, incident reports, project updates, etc.).
Same request, same model, once with the skill and once without. Read both and judge for yourself.
“Write the internal incident summary for yesterday's checkout outage. It's going to the whole engineering org in Slack.”
Source material given with the request
Timeline (Oct 25, all times UTC):
14:02 Raj merged a config change that lowered the payment service DB connection pool from 50 to 5
14:06 checkout error rate climbs; on-call (Mei) paged at 14:11
14:30 Mei finds pool exhaustion in payment-service logs
14:49 config reverted, errors back to normal by 14:53
Impact: 47 minutes of degraded checkout, about 3% of checkout attempts failed (roughly 2,100 orders). No data lost.
Why it got through: config changes skip the load test that code changes run.
Agreed follow-ups: add config changes to the load test pipeline (Owner: Lena, by Nov 6);
alert on pool usage above 80% (Owner: Mei, by Oct 30).
without
*Incident summary: Checkout degradation — Oct 25*
From 14:06 to 14:53 UTC yesterday, checkout experienced elevated errors. About 3% of checkout attempts failed—roughly 2,100 orders—during the 47-minute incident. No data was lost.
*Cause*
A configuration change reduced the payment service’s database connection pool from 50 to 5, leading to pool exhaustion. The change reached production because configuration changes bypass the load tests required for code changes.
*Timeline (UTC)*
• *14:02* — Configuration change merged.
• *14:06* — Checkout error rate began rising.
• *14:11* — On-call engineer Mei was paged.
• *14:30* — Mei identified pool exhaustion in payment-service logs.
• *14:49* — Configuration reverted.
• *14:53* — Error rates returned to normal.
*Follow-ups*
• Include configuration changes in the load test pipeline — *Lena, by Nov 6*.
• Add an alert for connection pool usage above 80% — *Mei, by Oct 30*.
The key gap was in our validation process: a configuration change affecting service capacity did not receive the same load testing as a code change.
Answers are shown exactly as the model wrote them, from the first try, and nothing is picked by hand.
Claude Sonnet 5.5
made by Anthropic
claude-sonnet-5-5 · revision not reported by the provider
1 try per case · tested 1 Nov 2026
GPT-6.1 Sol
made by OpenAI
gpt-6.1-sol · revision not reported by the provider
1 try per case · tested 1 Nov 2026
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exec-slip-update
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incident-writeup
“Write the internal incident summary for yesterday's checkout outage. It's going to the whole engineering org in Slack.”
office-move-faq
“People keep asking the same things about the office move in #general. Write an FAQ we can pin, using what we actually know so far.”
weekly-update-from-notes
“Turn my notes into this week's update from the Payments team for leadership. They skim these, so keep it short.”
Download the .zip and unzip it. Put its files, in a folder named internal-comms, here:
Claude Code
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~/.agents/skills/Every project. For one repository only, use .agents/skills/ inside it.Cursor
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