Automated Incident Response: Nobody Should Be the Scribe
Harness, Tuesday, August 25th, 2026
A Harness product lead argues humans should not act as the status-tracking layer during incidents.
A Harness product lead makes the case that humans should not serve as the status-tracking layer during an incident.
In most organizations someone ends up as the scribe, maintaining the timeline, updating stakeholders and capturing what happened, which consumes a responder who could be fixing the problem. The post argues automated summaries and postmortems can replace that role, generating the incident record from the signals and actions already being captured.
The result is both fewer people pulled into coordination overhead and a more complete record than a distracted human produces under pressure.