root-cause-analysis

root-cause-analysis is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from orlando-japan/claude-code-setting. It costs 38 tokens per session (1,068 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for root-cause analysis, the process of finding the underlying reason a problem happened rather than only treating its visible symptom.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it while debugging, after an incident, or when a fix worked but the reason was unclear. It teaches the 5 Whys method and explains when to stop asking why.
Why use it?
It helps prevent the same incident from returning by tracing a failure back to a system-level cause that can be changed.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting/root-cause-analysis
Any agent
npx skills add orlando-japan/claude-code-setting --skill root-cause-analysis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting

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 root-cause-analysis

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting/root-cause-analysis.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting/root-cause-analysis)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting/root-cause-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orlando-japan/claude-code-setting/root-cause-analysis.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,068 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00038 $0.01068
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00534
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00214
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00107

Measured 5d ago against content hash a44272bab78a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

root-cause-analysis 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 5d 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.

templates/extra/skills/root-cause-analysis/SKILL.md · 105 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 105 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Root cause analysis

A symptom is what you see. A cause is what produced it. Fixing the symptom stops the pain now; fixing the cause stops the pain forever.

The 5 Whys

The simplest tool: ask "why" until you hit a cause you can act on at the system level, not the code level.

Example:

  • Symptom: the checkout page returned 500 errors at 3pm.
  • Why? → The payment service threw an unhandled exception.
  • Why? → It received a null value for user.address.
  • Why? → The user service returned a user with no address field.
  • Why? → The migration that added address only ran for new users; old users had no address.
  • Why? → The migration didn't include a backfill step for existing rows.

Stop condition reached: "We don't enforce backfill as part of migration review." That's actionable at the system level — write a checklist, add a lint, add the review rule. Fixing at this level prevents the next null pointer.

Going further ("why don't we have a checklist?" → "we never thought of it") doesn't help. You've hit the useful floor.

Guardrails on 5 Whys

  • Stop at a cause you can act on. Not "a human made a mistake." "A human made a mistake" is never a root cause — it's where to start asking why the system permitted the mistake.
  • Don't stop at "bad code." Bad code got merged, that's a process question. Why did review not catch it? Why did tests not catch it?
  • One "why" per step. Don't branch mid-sequence. If there are two causes, analyze them separately.
  • Follow causal chains, not correlations. "Shipped Tuesday, broke Tuesday" is correlation. Prove causation.

Causes come in layers

For most incidents, you'll find multiple layers of cause:

  1. Technical cause. Null pointer, race, config mistake.
  2. Process cause. Code review missed it, test wasn't in the suite, deploy policy let it through.
  3. Organizational cause. No owner for this service, pressure to ship, stale on-call rotation.

A good RCA addresses at least two layers. A great one addresses all three. Fixing only the technical cause guarantees a next incident with a different technical symptom and the same process gap.

Read the full file on GitHub · 105 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. 5d ago First seen · 105 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A a44272bab78a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

root-cause-analysis is a skill published in the GitHub repository orlando-japan/claude-code-setting (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 1,068 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-31.

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