halo-effect

halo-effect is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 131 tokens per session (1,792 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A judgment error in which one strong impression makes unrelated qualities seem equally good or bad. For example, a respected CEO may be assumed to have excellent strategy and execution without separate evidence.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to evaluate employees, candidates, vendors, leaders, companies, investments, business books, or your own performance more carefully.
Why use it?
It helps prevent hiring, reviews, vendor assessments, and investment decisions from being driven by reputation or likeability instead of specific evidence.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to evaluate employees, candidates, vendors, leaders, companies, investments, business books, or your own performance more carefully.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/halo-effect
Install

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.

Any agent
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill halo-effect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for halo-effect

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/halo-effect/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/halo-effect)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/halo-effect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/halo-effect/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for halo-effect

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/halo-effect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/halo-effect.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 131 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,792 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00131 $0.01792
Opus 5 $0.00066 $0.00896
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00358
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00179

Measured 9d ago against content hash 522adaacdbb6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

halo-effect 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 9d 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.

halo-effect/SKILL.md · 125 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 125 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Halo Effect

Overview

A single positive or negative impression biases judgments of all unrelated attributes. A "great" CEO is assumed to have great strategy, vision, and execution; a beloved brand's features are rated higher than equivalent features from less-loved brands. Documented by Thorndike (1920), formalized by Nisbett & Wilson (1977), applied to business analysis by Rosenzweig (2007) — who showed business books overclaim because their descriptions follow company performance, not underlying reality.

Composes with fundamental-attribution-error, narrative-fallacy, confirmation-bias, hindsight-bias, survivorship-bias.

When to Use

  • Reading business books, case studies, or analyst reports
  • Conducting or designing performance reviews
  • Conducting or designing hiring interviews
  • Evaluating vendor, supplier, or partner performance
  • Evaluating investment opportunities or CEO impact
  • Conducting self-assessment
  • Someone says "halo effect," "visionary leader," "everything they do is great"
  • An "AI company" label, a marquee investor, or a famous-lab pedigree is doing the rating's work — evaluating an AI vendor, an AI-boom valuation, or a fluent model answer rated as accurate because it sounds confident

Not when: the global impression is itself the relevant judgment; attribute-by-attribute analysis would produce decision paralysis.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: user has a specific evaluation → run The Process directly.
  • Coach mode: user is unfamiliar or has no concrete case → 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.

  1. One-line: when one impression colors all judgments of unrelated attributes, you're feeling, not evaluating.
  2. Check fit: judging multiple attributes of one target? Halo is a risk.
  3. Elicit the case: what attributes are rated? All similarly positive or negative?

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Probe: what's the global impression? Would rating each attribute independently change anything? What would a contrarian say?

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Close: name which attributes have real evidence vs. halo; propose structured rubric for next evaluation.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

Read the full file on GitHub · 125 lines

Files

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.

Changes

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.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 125 lines · 131 tokens per session scan A 522adaacdbb6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

halo-effect is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 131 tokens to every session and 1,792 once invoked, about $0.0007 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 2026-09-03.

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