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Cover image for 💀 Inside BugMortem: Building a Cyber-Gothic Digital Morgue for Production Crashes with Kiro
Adam Gierczak
Adam Gierczak

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💀 Inside BugMortem: Building a Cyber-Gothic Digital Morgue for Production Crashes with Kiro

#webdev #devops #kiroweenhackathon26 #showdev

Every software engineer and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) knows that cold, paralyzing dread: it's 3:17 AM, PagerDuty is sounding alarms like an air-raid siren, the monitoring dashboard is flatlining at 0 BPM, and the terminal is vomiting thousands of incomprehensible red stack traces.

Most post-mortem tools treat catastrophic production outages like boring administrative chores — spreadsheets, sterile ticketing forms, and tedious retrospectives.

For the Kiroween {2026} Hackathon (Costume Contest: Spooky & Distinctive Developer Tools track), I set out to flip that dynamic completely.

Meet BugMortem — an interactive, cyber-gothic digital morgue and automated forensic report generator for catastrophic software failures.

⚡ What is BugMortem?

BugMortem transforms real software catastrophes into a forensic, surgical investigation:

  1. Flatline HUD & ECG Monitor: A cybernetic emergency room interface with audio-visual flatline cues, vitals monitoring, and instant incident severity classification (P0 Critical / P1 Major).
  2. The 5 Canonical Nightmares: Preloaded, forensic deep-dives into industry-standard software horrors:
    • React SSR / Next.js: Hydration Mismatch Nightmare (P0) — DOM tree divergence caused by illegal client-only browser state accessed during server render.
    • Node.js Heap: Silent Memory Leak & Linux OOM Killer 137 (P0) — Dangling EventEmitter closures retaining 4GB+ until the OS kernel sends SIGKILL.
    • HTTP Handshake: CORS & Auth Headers Preflight Massacre (P1) — Unhandled OPTIONS preflight cascades breaking SPAs on cross-domain APIs.
    • PostgreSQL / Prisma: Connection Pool Starvation (P0) — Leaked database connections locking payment checkouts under high concurrency.
    • Distributed Microservices: Cascading Retry Storm (P1) — Synchronous retries without exponential backoff or jitter amplifying request bursts by 500%.
  3. Forensic Timeline of Doom: Chronological reconstruction of the fatal seconds and telemetry alerts leading up to the collapse.
  4. Side-by-Side Code Autopsy: Direct juxtaposition of the cursed code against the resurrected, safe SRE solution — complete with 1-click clipboard copy.
  5. Custom Incident Ingestion (Live Morgue Intake): An interactive intake form allowing teams to paste their own real-world crash logs, select severity, and auto-generate an incident protocol.
  6. 1-Click SRE Incident Protocol Exporter: Instant export to standardized, professional Markdown (.md) formatted for Jira, Confluence, and GitHub Issues.
  7. Cyber-Gothic Incident Death Certificate (PDF): A stylized, printable A4 clinical certificate with morgue reference number, vital stats, and SRE certification seal.

🏗️ Technical Architecture & Ironclad Rules

BugMortem was engineered using modern web standards without sacrificing UX performance or accessibility:

  • Framework: Next.js 16.4 App Router, TypeScript 5.9, Turbopack, and pnpm.
  • Styling & Theme: Tailwind CSS v4 with custom dark/light cyber-morgue tokens (@variant dark) and zero inline-styles.
  • Pure i18n Architecture: Complete bilingual support (English default for Kiroween judges + Polish) driven by modular dictionaries (src/i18n/locales/en.ts and pl.ts). Zero hardcoded UI strings — 100% dynamic token resolution via typed hooks.
  • Advanced Polish & Typography Polish: Automated non-breaking space insertion (text-wrap: pretty;) to eliminate ugly hanging single-letter conjunctions on mobile viewports.
  • Zero Bloat & Mobile-First: Responsive forensic layout engineered from 320px screens to ultra-wide 4K workstations.
  • 100/100 PageSpeed Benchmark: Perfect scores across Performance, Accessibility (WCAG AAA), Best Practices, and SEO with sub-second FCP/LCP (0.9s).

🤖 Architected for Kiro: Specifications as Code (/.kiro)

One of the most powerful requirements of the Kiroween hackathon was embracing Kiro — an agentic development paradigm driven by formal project specifications.

Instead of writing code blindly, the BugMortem codebase was structured around dedicated Kiro steering directories tracked in Git:

bugmortem/
├── .kiro/
│   ├── specs/bugmortem/
│   │   ├── requirements.md        # Formal functional/non-functional criteria
│   │   └── tasks.md               # Step-by-step verified roadmap
│   ├── steering/
│   │   └── rules.md               # Strict architectural invariants
│   ├── hooks/
│   │   └── pbt-test-runner.json   # Automated test trigger on file changes
│   └── agents/
│       └── sre-autopsy-agent.json # Custom SRE Forensic Autopsy specialist
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🔬 What's New in BugMortem v2 (November 5 Update)

Since our initial submission, we pushed BugMortem's engineering rigor and realism even further:

1. Zero-Asset Procedural Web Audio API Synthesizer

Rather than streaming bloated audio files, we built an entirely procedural Web Audio API sound synthesizer (0 KB network payload):

  • P0 Critical Flatline: Continuous emergency tone indicating total service death.
  • P1 Warning Pulse: Rhythmic hospital heartbeat tone (~70 BPM) simulating a degraded service under pressure.
  • Resurrection Chime: A triumphant harmonic chord triggered upon copying safe SRE code, transitioning the HUD ECG to a healthy emerald wave.
  • Autoplay & Mute Guard: Fully compliant with browser audio autoplay policies and includes an instant header mute toggle.

2. 33 Invariant Assertions: Property-Based Testing with fast-check

To ensure the autopsy engine never chokes on real-world chaotic log dumps, we implemented 33 property-based test invariants using Vitest and fast-check:

  • Invariant 1 (Resilience): Fuzzing parser inputs with completely arbitrary/corrupted strings guarantees the pipeline never throws unhandled exceptions.
  • Invariant 2 (Severity Bounds): Severity always strictly resolves to deterministic P0 or P1.
  • Invariant 3 (Timeline Monotonicity): Events strictly follow non-decreasing time order, always ending with a fatal crash terminus.
  • Invariant 4 (Schema Fidelity): Exported Markdown and death records consistently contain all necessary SRE post-mortem sections.

3. Automated Kiro Hooks & Dedicated SRE Sub-Agent

We leveraged advanced Kiro configuration primitives:

  • Automated Hook (.kiro/hooks/pbt-test-runner.json): Triggers pnpm test --run upon source code modifications to prevent invariant regressions.
  • Specialized Forensic Agent (.kiro/agents/sre-autopsy-agent.json): A custom Kiro sub-agent persona configured with explicit blameless RCA directives and strict type-safe patch synthesis rules.

4. Cyber-Gothic Incident Death Certificate (Printable PDF)

Engineers can now export an official A4 Death Certificate directly from the autopsy view. Styled like a clinical forensic pathology document, it includes timestamped vitals, memory biopsies, root-cause analyses, and an official "SRE RESURRECTED • BUGMORTEM APPROVED" coroner seal.

🎃 Summary & Feedback

BugMortem transforms catastrophic post-incident reviews from dreaded administrative chores into an engaging, educational experience.

Check out the live demo at https://bugmortem.vercel.app and let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

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