deep-root-cause-investigator

deep-root-cause-investigator is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from caiaffa/claude-code-ultimate-engineering-system. It costs 29 tokens per session (572 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured method for finding the deeper causes of outages and bugs. It traces a failure from what users saw through the triggering event, missing safeguards, missed detection, and the broader system weakness.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when incidents recur, when a fix addressed only symptoms, or when a failure passed existing checks and needs permanent corrective actions.
Why use it?
It avoids stopping at explanations such as “human error” or a single bug, which may allow the same class of failure to happen again.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it when incidents recur, when a fix addressed only symptoms, or when a failure passed existing checks and needs permanent corrective actions.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/caiaffa/claude-code-ultimate-engineering-system/deep-root-cause-investigator
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 caiaffa/claude-code-ultimate-engineering-system --skill deep-root-cause-investigator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/caiaffa/claude-code-ultimate-engineering-system

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 deep-root-cause-investigator

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/caiaffa/claude-code-ultimate-engineering-system/deep-root-cause-investigator/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/caiaffa/claude-code-ultimate-engineering-system/deep-root-cause-investigator)
Your own site
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agentmods 80×15 button for deep-root-cause-investigator

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/caiaffa/claude-code-ultimate-engineering-system/deep-root-cause-investigator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/caiaffa/claude-code-ultimate-engineering-system/deep-root-cause-investigator.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 572 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.
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 $0.00029 $0.00572
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00286
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00114
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00057

Measured 8d ago against content hash 07987f2f6e55, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

deep-root-cause-investigator 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 8d ago.

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.

skills/deep-root-cause-investigator/SKILL.md · 53 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 53 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Mission

Eliminate classes of failure, not just the latest instance.

When to use

  • Incidents recur.
  • A fix addressed symptoms but not causes.
  • A failure passed existing safeguards.
  • The team needs deeper learning from an outage or bug.

Handoff

  • Receives from: staff-sre or incident-response (after incident contained).
  • Hands off to: postmortem-reviewer (for postmortem), incident-learning-loop (for systemic changes).

The cause chain method

Every incident has layers. Peel all of them:

1. SYMPTOM       → What did users/systems experience?
2. TRIGGER       → What specific event started the failure?
3. LOCAL CAUSE   → Why did the trigger cause harm? (the bug, the misconfiguration)
4. ENABLING CONDITION → Why was the local cause possible? (missing validation, weak contract)
5. FAILED DETECTION → Why didn't we catch it before impact? (missing alert, weak test)
6. FAILED CONTAINMENT → Why didn't we limit the blast radius? (no circuit breaker, no rollback)
7. SYSTEMIC ROOT  → What class of problem does this represent? (no contract enforcement, no migration safety)

Red flags — investigation is too shallow if

  • Root cause is "human error" (what made the error possible/damaging?).
  • Root cause is "bug in line 42" (why was it possible? why not caught?).
  • Root cause is "misconfiguration" (why was the misconfig possible? why no validation?).
  • Only the trigger is identified, not the enabling conditions.
  • Corrective actions only fix this specific instance, not the class.

Anti-patterns in root cause analysis

Shallow answer Better question
"Developer made a mistake" Why did the system allow this mistake to reach production?
"Missing test" Why doesn't our test strategy catch this class of bug?
"Config was wrong" Why is config not validated? Why no canary?
"Dependency was slow" Why no timeout? Why no circuit breaker? Why no alert on latency?

Output format

  1. Symptom (user/system experience)
  2. Root cause chain (all 7 layers)
  3. Systemic contributors (patterns, not just this instance)
  4. Why safeguards failed (detection, containment, prevention)
  5. Permanent corrective actions (class-level, not instance-level, with owner + deadline)

Read the full file on GitHub · 53 lines

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. 8d ago First seen · 53 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A 07987f2f6e55

Subscribe to this mod's changes

deep-root-cause-investigator is a skill published in the GitHub repository caiaffa/claude-code-ultimate-engineering-system (17 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 572 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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