lindy-effect

lindy-effect is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 119 tokens per session (1,979 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A rule of thumb for judging long-lasting ideas, technologies, books, and institutions: things that have survived for a long time may be more likely to remain useful. It is a statistical clue, not a guarantee.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps compare foundational technologies, libraries, frameworks, practices, books, and institutions before replacing them with newer alternatives.
Why use it?
It provides a way to weigh established options against newer ones when switching costs or long-term reliability matter.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit It helps compare foundational technologies, libraries, frameworks, practices, books, and institutions before replacing them with newer alternatives.

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

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/lindy-effect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/lindy-effect.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 119 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,979 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 $0.00119 $0.01979
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.00989
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00396
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00198

Measured 9d ago against content hash 2b1288478aa4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

lindy-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.

lindy-effect/SKILL.md · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Lindy Effect

Overview

For non-perishable items — ideas, books, technologies, institutions, practices — life expectancy is proportional to current age. The longer something has survived competitive elimination, the longer its expected remaining life. Math: if survival follows a Pareto distribution with α ≈ 1, expected remaining life ≈ current age. Not nostalgia — statistical inference from a track record of passing elimination tests.

Composes with antifragile (Lindy-survival is the signature of antifragility), survivorship-bias (paired warning), first-principles (Lindy says that; first-principles says why), switching-costs, and chestertons-fence.

When to Use

  • Choosing a foundational technology / library / framework with high switching cost
  • Evaluating a long-established practice or institution someone is proposing to discard
  • Assessing a new methodology being marketed as "modern" or "evidence-based"
  • Allocating reading time across old vs. new books
  • Designing institutional partnerships with multi-decade horizons
  • Deciding which layers of an AI stack to build on time-tested foundations (SQL, Unix, TCP/IP) vs. fast-churning AI frameworks amid the AI adoption hype
  • Someone says "this has stood the test of time," "we should modernize," "this time is different"

Not when: item is perishable or has a deterministic life cycle; elimination forces are absent (old institution survives only via regulatory protection); conditions have genuinely changed enough to invalidate survival evidence; decision time-horizon is too short for long-run durability to matter.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: user has a concrete old-vs-new decision → run The Process directly.
  • Coach mode: user unfamiliar or 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.

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 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 · 124 lines · 119 tokens per session scan A 2b1288478aa4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

lindy-effect is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 119 tokens to every session and 1,979 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 2026-09-03.

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