shawnclybor

Five Whys — Development skill for Claude Code

Development community

Walk the five-whys root-cause analysis protocol when something broke unexpectedly.

How to install Five Whys

Installs to ~/.claude/commands/shawnclybor-clybor-claude-tooling-five-whys.md

Terminal

mkdir -p ~/.claude/commands && curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shawnclybor/clybor-claude-tooling/HEAD/.claude/commands/five-whys.md -o ~/.claude/commands/shawnclybor-clybor-claude-tooling-five-whys.md

Restart Claude Code, or start a new session, for it to be picked up.

What Five Whys does

description: Walk the five-whys root-cause analysis protocol when something broke unexpectedly.

/five-whys

Invoke the `five-whys` skill. Use when a tool failed twice, output is wrong despite correct-looking inputs, or you catch yourself about to retry blindly.

Usage

/five-whys

The skill prompts you for the problem statement and walks the protocol.

When to skip

Routine errors with obvious fixes (typo, missing param, wrong path)
Single-failure cases that obviousl

Alternatives in Development

Root Cause Tracing — Use when errors occur deep in execution and you need to trace back to find the original trigger 102.5k ★
Porters Five Forces — Porter's Five Forces competitive analysis with strategic insights 7.8k ★
Engage.Crash — Crash → root cause → reachability → empirical exploitability verdict (native bugs) 348 ★