The same root cause keeps coming back because nobody tracks it. I built a zero-dep CLI that does.

You write the postmortem. You file the action items. Everyone nods, the doc gets archived, and life moves on. Six months later, the exact same root cause takes down the exact same service — and nobody in the room remembers the first incident, let alone that its fix never actually shipped. "We use rootly to track this automatically. It flags when incidents have the same root cause as previous ones." That's a real answer from an SRE thread about this exact problem — and it's a paid, hosted feature of a full incident-management platform. Most teams don't have rootly or incident.io. What they have is a folder of markdown postmortems that nobody diffs against each other. So I built rootecho : a zero-dependency CLI that does the one useful thing those platforms do for this — flag when a new incident's root cause echoes a past one, and show you whether that past incident's action items ever actually got finished. How it works Each postmortem is one JSON record — free-text root_cause and/or curated root_cause_tags , plus action_items with a status: { "id" : "INC-2026-014" , "title" : "Payment webhook retries exhausted" , "root_cause" : "webhook retry queue misconfigured to drop after 3 attempts, no dead-letter fallback" , "root_cause_tags" : [ "webhook" , "retry-queue" , "dead-letter" , "config" ], "action_items" : [ { "id" : "AI-1" , "description" : "Add dead-letter queue for webhook retries" , "owner" : "alice" , "status" : "open" } ] } rootecho add records it and compares against your history: $ rootecho add inc-2026-014.json ⚠ root cause echo detected for "INC-2026-014": INC-2026-003 (2026-03-15) — 100% similar root cause Payment webhook retries exhausted ✓ Add retry backoff [done] ✗ Add monitoring alert for queue depth [open] — 93d overdue → 1 action item(s) from this past incident were never finished. recorded to .rootecho/history.jsonl That's the whole point of the tool in one output: not just "you've seen this before," but "and here's the fix that never happened." r