margin-of-safety

margin-of-safety is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 138 tokens per session (1,992 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A risk-management principle that builds extra room into an estimate, investment, budget, timeline, or plan in case reality is worse than expected. It comes from value investing, where an asset is bought below its estimated true value.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to size investment positions, project budgets, delivery schedules, fundraising runway, hiring plans, or capacity commitments.
Why use it?
It reduces the chance that an inaccurate estimate or unexpected problem causes a permanent loss or project failure.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to size investment positions, project budgets, delivery schedules, fundraising runway, hiring plans, or capacity commitments.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/margin-of-safety
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 margin-of-safety
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 margin-of-safety

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/margin-of-safety"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/margin-of-safety.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 138 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,992 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 $0.00138 $0.01992
Opus 5 $0.00069 $0.00996
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00398
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00199

Measured 9d ago against content hash 1297c34eb070, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

margin-of-safety 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.

margin-of-safety/SKILL.md · 126 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 126 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Margin of Safety

Overview

Benjamin Graham introduced margin of safety in Security Analysis (1934) as the founding principle of value investing: buy assets at prices substantially below your estimate of intrinsic value so that estimation errors and adverse events don't produce permanent loss. The principle generalizes to engineering load factors, project budgets, founder runway, and any commitment where your estimate could be wrong.

The unifying insight: point estimates are systematically optimistic. Margin of safety is the structural discipline that survives that optimism.

Composes with antifragile (margin = bounded-downside half), black-swan (margin is what survives the tail you didn't predict), expected-value-and-kelly (margin sizing relates to Kelly fractional-betting), and first-principles (audit the estimate first; then apply margin).

When to Use

  • Sizing any commitment under uncertainty: investment positions, project budgets, fundraising timelines, hiring plans, capacity reservations
  • A point estimate is being used as the basis for a major decision
  • "Just-in-time" or "lean" or "fully utilized" pressure is removing buffers from a critical system
  • A historically reliable system has been gradually de-buffered until it operates at the edge
  • Weighing whether a stretched valuation leaves any buffer — AI capex assumptions, AI-era valuations, or whether a price already extrapolates optimistic AI adoption
  • Someone says: "margin of safety," "Ben Graham," "value investing," "buffer," "load factor," "buy a dollar for fifty cents," "Mr. Market"

Not when: the domain is genuinely deterministic with no estimation error (rare); the cost of the buffer exceeds the expected loss from going without; you are using margin as an excuse to avoid any commitment ("perpetual margin" is procrastination).

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

Read the full file on GitHub · 126 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 · 126 lines · 138 tokens per session scan A 1297c34eb070

Subscribe to this mod's changes

margin-of-safety is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 138 tokens to every session and 1,992 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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