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.
npx agentmods add skills/tkellogg/open-strix/five-whysnpx skills add tkellogg/open-strix --skill five-whysgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tkellogg/open-strixWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tkellogg/open-strix/five-whys)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tkellogg/open-strix/five-whys"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tkellogg/open-strix/five-whys.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00096 | $0.03039 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00048 | $0.01520 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00019 | $0.00608 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00304 |
Grade A, and why
five-whys 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 281 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Five Whys
Five Whys is a method for finding root causes. You ask "why did this happen?" and answer it honestly. Then you ask "why?" about that answer. You keep going until you hit bedrock — the structural cause that, if changed, would prevent the problem from recurring.
The goal is understanding, not blame. You're investigating a system (which includes yourself). Systems have structural properties that produce outcomes. Find the structural property, change it, and the outcome changes.
When to Use This
- Something failed or went wrong and the surface-level explanation feels incomplete
- A pattern keeps recurring despite previous fixes
- You're about to make a change and want to make sure you're fixing the right thing
- Behavior (yours or a system's) has drifted from expectations
- Someone asks "why does this keep happening?"
When NOT to Use This
- The cause is obvious and singular (typo, wrong config value, missing file)
- You're troubleshooting a known bug with a known fix
- The problem is "how do I do X?" not "why did X go wrong?"
The Process
Step 1: State the Problem
Write down what happened. Be specific. Not "it broke" but "the classifier produced 11 consecutive errors between iterations 83-93, spending 57 minutes with zero successful runs."
The problem statement is the root of your tree.
Step 2: Ask Why — And Answer It
For the problem (or any node in the tree), ask: "Why did this happen?"
Then answer it. Both the question and the answer matter equally. A question without an answer is incomplete. An answer without a clear question is unanchored.
PROBLEM: 11 consecutive classifier errors, 57 min wasted
WHY: The proposer suggested CatBoost, which isn't in the allowed algorithm list
ANSWER: The proposer has no documentation of which algorithms are available
Rules for good answers:
- An answer must be factual and verifiable. Check logs, read code, look at data. Don't speculate — investigate.
- If you can't verify an answer, say so. "I believe X but haven't confirmed" is honest. "X" stated as fact when you haven't checked is not.
- An answer should be a mechanism, not a redescription. "It failed because it was broken" is circular, not explanatory.
What ships with it
2 files 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.
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.
- 5d ago First seen · 281 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A 3c756b8e9e17
five-whys is a skill published in the GitHub repository tkellogg/open-strix (85 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 3,039 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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