rca

rca is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from assafkip/kipi-system. It costs 100 tokens per session (806 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured root-cause analysis tool for code failures. Root-cause analysis explains why a defect or blocked delivery happened and which missing safeguard allowed it through.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after shipped defects, failed validation, blocked runs, recurring bugs, or when writing a postmortem in the project’s required format and location.
Why use it?
It separates the visible symptom from the deeper process or guardrail problem, helping prevent the same failure from recurring.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Part of the kipi-core plugin — 10 skills, 7 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it after shipped defects, failed validation, blocked runs, recurring bugs, or when writing a postmortem in the project’s required format and location.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/assafkip/kipi-system/rca
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add assafkip/kipi-system --skill rca
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/assafkip/kipi-system

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install kipi-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills, 7 commands.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for rca

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/assafkip/kipi-system/rca.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/assafkip/kipi-system/rca)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/assafkip/kipi-system/rca"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/assafkip/kipi-system/rca.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 100 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 806 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00100 $0.00806
Opus 5 $0.00050 $0.00403
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00161
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00081

Measured 9d ago against content hash f5d3e090d77a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rca scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (build-standalone.sh, scripts/rca-lint.py, scripts/rca-notify.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/kipi-core/skills/rca/SKILL.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

RCA Skill

The diagnostic counterpart to forward planning. When a failure gets past a test, a gate, or review, write a root-cause analysis to the canonical template. The goal is never who, it is: what guardrail was missing and why the mistake was easy to make.

Before writing

Read references/rca-template.md. It is the canonical structure and the exact contract the lint enforces. Do not improvise a different shape.

When to write an RCA

  • A defect shipped and a human or a gate caught it after the fact.
  • A run came back BLOCKED, or a deliverable failed validation.
  • A bug recurs after a prior fix (the prior fix treated a symptom).
  • The user says "rca this", "root cause this", "postmortem this", "why did this break".

A trivial bug you fix in the same breath, that never escaped a gate, does not need an RCA. A failure that got past a test, a gate, or review does.

Where RCAs land

q-system/output/rca/rca-<slug>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.md inside a kipi instance, or rca/rca-<slug>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.md in a plain repo. The lint fires on any file named rca-*.md / premortem-*.md or any doc whose H1 starts with # RCA: or # Premortem.

The rules the lint enforces

  1. Surface vs structural root cause. Surface is the trigger (what fired). Structural is the latent systemic cause (why it was allowed and went uncaught).
  2. Multi-factor. Use ### Root cause #1, ### Root cause #2 when more than one structural cause contributed. Resist a single tidy cause.
  3. Cause-type tags. Each structural cause carries a type: line, one of: code-defect, config, environmental-trigger, missing-test, implicit-contract, process, capacity.
  4. Verification is evidence. Show the command and result ("ran X, got Y") or the passing test. An assertion with no observed output is not verification.
  5. Action items are checkboxes with owners. Not prose. An RCA is not finished until its actions are owned and trackable.
  6. Blameless. Describe system, contract, gate, and test failures. Never name a person as the cause.

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 67 lines · 100 tokens per session scan A f5d3e090d77a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rca is a skill published in the GitHub repository assafkip/kipi-system (110 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 100 tokens to every session and 806 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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