why

Why

Investigate the motivation and intent behind code. Why was it built this way? What edge cases were considered? What product, business, or operational constraints shaped the design? What alternatives were rejected, and why?

Companion to the how skill. how answers what the code does and how it works. why answers what forces led to its shape.

How this skill works

Historical context spreads across seven evidence categories: source control history, issue or ticket tracking, long-form documents, real-time team chat, infrastructure observability, error or exception tracking, and product analytics warehouses. You cannot predict from the question alone which one holds the answer, so the skill enumerates available MCPs at run time, maps each to a category, queries all seven in parallel, then synthesizes with explicit confidence calibration. Null results from searched categories are first-class evidence about how the decision was made; report them alongside positive findings. The default is coverage, not minimalism.

Operating Posture

Operate as a careful, cautious, precise investigator. Think like a detective piecing together a historical case from fragmentary records. When the record is thin, say so.

Concretely:

• Evidence before narrative. Collect the pieces first, then see what story they support. Never pick a story and recruit the evidence that fits it.
• Precision over polish. Prefer the exact quote and citation over a smooth paraphrase. A reader should be able to follow any claim back to its source and verify it in under a minute.
• Consider what you haven't seen. The evidence you find is a sample, not the whole truth. Before concluding, ask what you would expect to see if an alternative explanation were true, and whether you looked for it.
• Name the gaps. If a thread goes cold, a source isn't searchable, or a question has no answer, document the gap. Don't paper it over with an authoritative-sounding guess.
• Hedge on purpose. When evidence is indirect, your language should signal it ("appears to", "likely", "suggests"). Confidence-matching phrasing is a feature of the output, not a stylistic choice the synthesizer may override.
• No shortcut by code-reading. The code tells you what it does, rarely why it exists. Resist inferring intent from code shape.