why

why is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from pantheon-org/tekhne. It costs 143 tokens per session (6,323 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research assistant for explaining why technical decisions were made and how systems behave. It gathers evidence from project history, team discussions, documentation, monitoring, and analytics.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate the reasons behind code or product decisions, understand regressions, write postmortems, and support thresholds with data.
Why use it?
It replaces guesswork with traceable evidence when investigating design choices, regressions, postmortems, or unusual results.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents; names the ExitPlanMode tool.

Good fit Use it to investigate the reasons behind code or product decisions, understand regressions, write postmortems, and support thresholds with data.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/why
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 pantheon-org/tekhne --skill why
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pantheon-org/tekhne

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 why

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/why/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/why)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/why"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/why/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 why

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/why"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/why.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 143 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,323 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00143 $0.06323
Opus 5 $0.00072 $0.03161
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.01265
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00632

Measured 9d ago against content hash 996b3e7243fa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

why 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 9d 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/software-engineering/why/SKILL.md · 378 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 378 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Why

Ported from the why skill in cursor/plugins pstack — Cursor, a separate AI-coding-editor product, not to be confused with a text/DB cursor — for use with this harness's Agent tool. Agent-spawning mechanics use this repo's actual subagent types and model/effort params in place of the original's source-specific model names and readonly flag; MCP discovery is adapted to how this session surfaces connected servers.

Git-history steps prefer a code-graph MCP first, when one is connected. If your environment has one (e.g. tokensave), prefer its graph tools over raw shell git commands for codebase research wherever an equivalent exists — a per-symbol blame/log tool gives structural history tracked across renames and is the first move for any target that's a function, method, class, or type. Raw git blame/git log --follow -p are the fallback for what a code-graph tool doesn't cover (or for when none is connected): line-precise blame that doesn't align to a symbol boundary, full raw patch text, or file kinds outside the tool's indexed languages. A semantic added/removed/modified-symbol diff tool, if available, is cheaper to read than a raw patch before deciding which commits are worth opening in full. See Step 2 for the full mapping. If such a tool reports a stale index for the current worktree, fall back to raw git for that worktree's own uncommitted or unindexed changes.

Map your own MCP stack before spawning investigators — don't assume any of these are connected. Source-control-hosting MCPs (GitLab, GitHub) commonly double as the issue-tracker category too; issue-tracker/long-form-docs MCPs (e.g. Jira/Confluence) commonly split into two investigators, one per product; chat MCPs (e.g. Slack) cover real-time chat. Infrastructure observability, error tracking, and product-analytics-warehouse MCPs (Datadog, Sentry, a data warehouse) are frequently absent — when they are, their investigators should come back "skipped, no MCP available," which is an honest gap, not a failure to search harder. If the repo has no remote, source-control investigation is local git (or code-graph) history only — skip straight to that rather than treating the absence of gh pr view/remote MR tooling as a search failure.

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.

Read the full file on GitHub · 378 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. 9d ago First seen · 378 lines · 143 tokens per session scan A 996b3e7243fa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

why is a skill published in the GitHub repository pantheon-org/tekhne (10 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 143 tokens to every session and 6,323 once invoked, about $0.0007 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 2026-09-03.

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