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 skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill death-spiralgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skillsWrote 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/deciqai/knowledge-skills/death-spiral)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/death-spiral"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/death-spiral/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/death-spiral"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/death-spiral.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 5.1 | $0.00112 | $0.02076 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00056 | $0.01038 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00022 | $0.00415 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00208 |
Grade A, and why
death-spiral 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 12d 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 — 118 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Death Spiral
Overview
A death spiral is a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop in competitive markets. Unlike ordinary decline — which is linear and potentially reversible — a death spiral is non-linear: each deterioration step actively causes the next to be worse and faster. The cycle begins when a competitor breaches a company's primary moat, then propagates through share loss → revenue decline → R&D contraction → product lag → further moat erosion.
Cross-skill composition: Use WITH [second-order-thinking] to trace downstream consequences early. Use BEFORE [margin-of-safety] to know which buffer to maintain. Use WITH [dynamic-core-competence] to diagnose which competence decay triggers the spiral.
When to Use
- Multi-quarter deterioration in key metrics with no identified reversal mechanism
- Competitor has established a durable product, distribution, or network advantage
- R&D budget being cut in response to revenue shortfalls (most dangerous early-spiral indicator)
- Leadership team minimizing a competitive threat as "temporary" without quantitative analysis
- A free general-purpose AI tool is doing the job your product charges for — growth slowed since a model release and "add AI features" is the whole response plan
When NOT to use: Decline is cyclical with demonstrated historical recovery; company is pre-product/pre-revenue; feedback loop has already completed (post-mortem use only).
Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)
- Engine mode: user has concrete multi-quarter data → run The Process directly.
- Coach mode: user says "we're losing customers and I'm worried" → guide step by step.
In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.
- What it is: A death spiral is a feedback loop where decline causes the conditions that accelerate further decline — self-amplifying, not just bad performance.
- Check fit: Are any declines causing other declines? Revenue loss → R&D cuts → product lag → more revenue loss? Feedback loop = yes; standard problem = no.
- Elicit: What makes customers stay? Which moat dimension has a competitor made progress against in the last 12 months?
[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]
- Map trigger: Has the moat been breached (durable advantage established), or is it being tested?
[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]
- Close: You'll know whether this is a standard performance problem or a structural spiral requiring intervention at a specific step within a specific time window.
[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]
What ships with it
3 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.
- 12d ago First seen · 118 lines · 112 tokens per session scan A dde16aeb6fed
death-spiral is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 112 tokens to every session and 2,076 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-31.
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