five-whys

five-whys is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ConrayGambit/Strategy-Consultant-5-Consulting-Frameworks. It costs 72 tokens per session (1,166 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A root-cause analysis method that asks why a problem happened repeatedly, usually five times. Each answer leads to the next question until the analysis reaches a deeper cause rather than a visible symptom.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate a known issue, test whether an apparent cause is truly fundamental, and produce a short chain of reasons followed by a root-cause statement.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish the underlying reason for a problem from the first explanation that comes to mind.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to investigate a known issue, test whether an apparent cause is truly fundamental, and produce a short chain of reasons followed by a root-cause statement.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/conraygambit/strategy-consultant-5-consulting-frameworks/five-whys
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 ConrayGambit/Strategy-Consultant-5-Consulting-Frameworks --skill five-whys
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ConrayGambit/Strategy-Consultant-5-Consulting-Frameworks

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 five-whys

README.md
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Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/conraygambit/strategy-consultant-5-consulting-frameworks/five-whys"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/conraygambit/strategy-consultant-5-consulting-frameworks/five-whys/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for five-whys

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/conraygambit/strategy-consultant-5-consulting-frameworks/five-whys"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/conraygambit/strategy-consultant-5-consulting-frameworks/five-whys.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,166 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 $0.00072 $0.01166
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00583
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00233
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00117

Measured 12d ago against content hash 9eb6e0f6e008, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

five-whys 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 12d 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/five-whys/SKILL.md · 71 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 71 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

5 Whys

Concept

Toyota's Sakichi Toyoda popularized the 5 Whys: take any apparent cause and ask "Why?" five times in succession. Each answer becomes the new statement; you drill until you hit a root cause that isn't itself a symptom of something deeper.

In the consulting toolkit, 5 Whys complements issue trees. Issue trees go wide (every plausible cause). 5 Whys goes deep on one branch — the one you suspect dominates. It's especially useful after a Pareto step has named the vital 20%, before committing to interventions.

Five is a heuristic, not a magic number. Sometimes you reach root cause at three; sometimes you have to push to seven. The discipline is asking "why" until the answer stops being a symptom and starts being something structural.

Required output format

A numbered list of five Why → Because pairs, followed by a one-sentence root-cause statement.

**Starting problem:** [The apparent issue you're drilling into.]

1. **Why?** [First-level reason]
2. **Why?** [Second-level — drilling into #1's answer]
3. **Why?** [Third-level — drilling into #2's answer]
4. **Why?** [Fourth-level — drilling into #3's answer]
5. **Why?** [Fifth-level — drilling into #4's answer]

**Root cause:** [One-sentence structural cause, addressable as a system change.]

Defaults & flex points

Default When to flex
5 levels deep Sometimes 3 is enough (the structural cause is shallow); sometimes 6–7 is needed (deep institutional cause). Push until the answer is no longer a symptom.
One thread Drill a single chain — don't branch mid-way. If the answer to a "Why?" is multi-causal, pick the dominant cause and drill that one. Run a separate 5 Whys on the other if needed.
Each Why builds on the previous Don't restart the chain or re-ask the same question. Each answer must logically follow from the one above.

The root-cause test: the final answer should be something you can change as a system — a process, a policy, an incentive, a data-flow design. If the final answer is "people are bad" or "the world is hard," you haven't reached root cause. Push deeper.

Read the full file on GitHub · 71 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. 12d ago First seen · 71 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 9eb6e0f6e008

Subscribe to this mod's changes

five-whys is a skill published in the GitHub repository ConrayGambit/Strategy-Consultant-5-Consulting-Frameworks (23 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 1,166 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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