five-whys SKILL.md skillA
five-whys from ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/five-whys@v2026.10.5Pins v2026.10.5 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills
- Path
skills/five-whys/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 1
- Latest version
- v2026.10.5, committed Oct 5, 2026
- Size
- 3,583 bytes
- Repository stars
- 17
- License
- MIT
Use for the 5 Whys, or when the user wants the root cause of a failure: "why did this happen?", "this keeps breaking", "write the postmortem", "find the real cause". Asks why repeatedly with evidence at each step, then sets countermeasures. Skip for one-off typos or when the cause is already proven.
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Five Whys A root-cause method from the Toyota Production System. Ask "why" of the previous answer until you reach a cause you can change, and check each link with evidence. ## When to use - An incident, outage, defect, missed deadline or process failure needs its real cause. - A problem repeats after quick fixes. - A postmortem or retrospective needs a causal chain, not a list of symptoms. Skip: a typo or one-line bug whose cause is already visible, or questions about metrics that need data analysis rather than a causal chain. ## Before you start 1. State in one block: **Problem statement** (what happened, where, when, impact, in observable terms) and **Pass** (Chain, Check, Branch if needed, Countermeasures). 2. **Gather first.** Read logs, commits, tickets, timelines and configs before answering any "why". Mark each answer `verified` (you saw evidence) or `hypothesis` (plausible, not yet checked). Ask up to 3 questions only for facts tools cannot reach. 3. **Light path.** Small ask: the chain in 3-5 lines, one countermeasure per root cause. ## Steps ### 1. Chain Write the problem, then ask why. Each "Why" answers the previous answer, not the original problem. …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/five-whys@sha256:7d1c76ac29101b1aThe line at the top of this page pins the label v2026.10.5, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_qo4rjbu2fd4e4muj)
2 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on Oct 5, 2026.
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (3583 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · 17 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-10-16 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_qo4rjbu2fd4e4muj GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/five-whys GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/7d1c76ac29101b1a1a6924a85567c8f17a335aa623d25b4224636d189486ff8c
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.
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