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Working with AI blocks in a retrospective

When a retrospective is created from a template that contains AI blocks, those sections generate automatically. You can also add AI blocks to any document yourself. Either way, every block stays live — you can regenerate, edit, convert, comment, and rate it. This page covers both. For everything else about the editor — formatting, data blocks, Liquid, and collaboration — see Using the Retrospective Editor.

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Insert a block with the slash menu

1

Place your cursor

Put the cursor where you want the section.
2

Open the slash menu

Type / to open the menu.
3

Pick an AI block

Choose one of the presets (Summary, Impact, Root Cause, Mitigation, Resolution, Curated Timeline) or a Custom AI block.
4

Describe a custom block

For a custom block, give it a title and a short prompt describing what you want.
The block is inserted and begins generating from the incident’s context.

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Watch it generate

AI blocks generate in place. While a block is working, it shows a generating state, and the content streams in live as it’s written — so you can see the draft take shape instead of waiting on a blank spinner. When a document is created from a template, you’ll see its AI blocks generating as the page loads.

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See how a block was generated

AI blocks aren’t a black box. Open a block’s details to see:
  • A short description of what the block is for.
  • The sources it drew on (incident data, the incident Slack channel, and the bridge-call transcript when available).
  • The system prompt behind the block, so you know how it was instructed to write.

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Edit, regenerate, and convert

A generated block behaves like the rest of your document. From the block’s toolbar you can:
  • Edit inline. Click into the block and type. Generated content is just text — rewrite or restructure it however you like.
  • Regenerate. Ask Rootly to write the section again. If you’ve changed the block’s instructions, the new draft reflects them.
  • Convert to plain text. “Freeze” the block — its content becomes ordinary document text and is no longer a live AI block.
  • Delete. Remove the block entirely.
  • Comment. Select text or the block and add a comment, just like anywhere else in the document.
Your edits are protected. If you regenerate a block you’ve edited by hand, Rootly asks you to confirm first — so you never lose manual changes by accident.

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Give feedback

Every AI block has 👍 / 👎 feedback controls. One click tells Rootly whether the generated content was useful. Feedback flows into Rootly’s evaluation pipeline to improve generation quality over time — it does not directly fine-tune the underlying model. If a block gets something wrong, the most useful thing you can do is mark it 👎 so it feeds our regression set.

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Exporting

When you publish or export a retrospective, AI block content is rendered as static content at the time of export — exactly like the document’s other blocks. The exported copy contains the generated text, not a live AI block. See Exporting Retrospectives for export destinations and options.

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Permissions

AI blocks follow your retrospective permissions. Observers (read-only users) can read AI block content but can’t regenerate, edit, convert, or delete it — the same as the rest of the document.

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FAQs

Refresh the document. If a block fails to generate, you can regenerate it from its toolbar. If it keeps failing, the incident may have very little context for that section; try a different block or add detail to the incident.
Not yet — once a block starts generating it runs to completion. You can regenerate or convert it afterward.
Not yet. Regenerating replaces the current content (after a confirmation if you’ve edited it). Toggling between drafts is on the roadmap.
Yes — set custom instructions on the block in the template. See Building AI Templates.