How It Works
Root cause analysis
Investigating a failure to find the underlying reason it happened, not just the visible symptom — asking 'why' repeatedly until you reach something fixable. In AI, it means tracing a wrong answer back to bad training data, a flawed prompt or a broken tool, rather than just patching the output.
Origin · no single documented coiner
Grew out of 20th-century engineering and quality management — Sakichi Toyoda's 'five whys' at Toyota in the 1930s is the classic version. Adopted by software reliability engineering and, more recently, AI evaluation work.
No single primary source link for this term.