find-cause

find-cause is a skill for Claude Code from Jamie-BitFlight/claude_skills. It costs 85 tokens per session (2,830 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured investigation workflow for finding why something happens, especially when debugging an issue or researching a root cause. It requires each conclusion to be tied to observable evidence such as command output or file contents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to clarify an investigation request, reproduce the behavior, inspect relevant evidence, trace likely causes, and report conclusions with supporting proof.
Why use it?
It prevents guesses from being presented as explanations and makes the investigation reproducible and easier to verify.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Good fit Use it to clarify an investigation request, reproduce the behavior, inspect relevant evidence, trace likely causes, and report conclusions with supporting proof.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jamie-bitflight/claude_skills/find-cause
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 Jamie-BitFlight/claude_skills --skill find-cause
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Jamie-BitFlight/claude_skills

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 find-cause

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jamie-bitflight/claude_skills/find-cause/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jamie-bitflight/claude_skills/find-cause)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jamie-bitflight/claude_skills/find-cause"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jamie-bitflight/claude_skills/find-cause/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 find-cause

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jamie-bitflight/claude_skills/find-cause"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jamie-bitflight/claude_skills/find-cause.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 85 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,830 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Rogue Agent · line 11
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 121
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 276
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00085 $0.02830
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.01415
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00566
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00283

Measured 10d ago against content hash a32d45654066, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

find-cause scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 10d 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

1. **System diagnostic tools** — `command -v rg docker podman strace ltrace jq yq curl` and any domain-relevant tools
.claude/skills/find-cause/SKILL.md · 278 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 278 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

<investigation_request>$ARGUMENTS</investigation_request>

Find Cause

Rewrite the user's investigation request using the evidence-chain protocol below, then execute it. The user's original request is in <investigation_request/>.

Evidence-Chain Protocol

<evidence_chain_rules>

Every claim in the investigation output MUST have a corresponding evidence entry. Evidence is one of:

  1. Command output — a command was executed and the output was captured
  2. File content — a file was read and a specific line range is cited
  3. Direct observation — a reproducible state was observed (directory listing, process output, HTTP response)

These are NOT evidence:

  • Documentation that describes intended behavior (docs describe intent, not reality)
  • Training data recall or pattern matching
  • Inference from absence ("the docs don't mention it, so it must not exist")
  • Reasoning from analogy ("X works this way, so Y does too")

</evidence_chain_rules>

Investigation Procedure

Step 0 — Discover investigation capabilities

Before investigating, discover what tools, servers, and agents are available. Execute these in parallel:

  1. System diagnostic toolscommand -v rg docker podman strace ltrace jq yq curl and any domain-relevant tools
  2. MCP servers — List connected MCP servers and their tools (use ListMcpResourcesTool or equivalent)
  3. Available agents — Check ~/.claude/agents/ and .claude/agents/ for specialized agents that could assist
  4. Active skills — Review loaded skills for relevant investigation protocols
  5. Containerization — Check for Docker/Podman if sandboxing may be needed: command -v docker podman

Record the results as an investigation capability matrix:

AVAILABLE CAPABILITIES:
- System tools: [list]
- MCP servers: [server -> relevant tools]
- Agents: [agent -> specialization]
- Skills: [skill -> investigation protocols]
- Sandbox options: [docker/podman/temp dir/none]

This matrix informs which verification paths are fastest in Step 1.5 and which advanced tools to leverage in Steps 2-3.

Read the full file on GitHub · 278 lines

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. 10d ago First seen · 278 lines · 85 tokens per session scan A a32d45654066

Subscribe to this mod's changes

find-cause is a skill published in the GitHub repository Jamie-BitFlight/claude_skills (66 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 85 tokens to every session and 2,830 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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