Root Cause Tracing

Root Cause Tracing is a skill for Claude Code from einverne/dotfiles. It costs 17 tokens per session (1,372 once invoked), scanned A, original, GPL-3.0.

A method for tracing a bug backward through the sequence of function calls that led to it, until you find the original trigger.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate failures, follow data and control flow backward, and identify the first event that caused incorrect behavior.
Why use it?
It helps avoid fixing only the visible error when the real cause happened earlier in the program.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: when-to-use in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to investigate failures, follow data and control flow backward, and identify the first event that caused incorrect behavior.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/einverne/dotfiles/root-cause-tracing
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 einverne/dotfiles --skill root-cause-tracing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/einverne/dotfiles

Made for: Claude Code.

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 Root Cause Tracing

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/einverne/dotfiles/root-cause-tracing.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/einverne/dotfiles/root-cause-tracing)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/einverne/dotfiles/root-cause-tracing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/einverne/dotfiles/root-cause-tracing.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 17 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,372 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 unknown 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 $0.00017 $0.01372
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00686
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00274
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00137

Measured 8d ago against content hash 476830e10488, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Root Cause Tracing 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (find-polluter.sh), 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.

claude/skills/debugging/root-cause-tracing/SKILL.md · 178 lines

The source is not reproduced here

Licensed GPL-3.0

The repository is licensed GPL-3.0, which this catalogue does not treat as permission to reproduce the file. Read it at the source.

Read it on GitHub

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 8d ago First seen · 178 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A 476830e10488

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Root Cause Tracing is a skill published in the GitHub repository einverne/dotfiles (121 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed GPL-3.0. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 1,372 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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