regret-minimization

regret-minimization is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 137 tokens per session (2,294 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision method that asks which choice you would regret most later in life, especially when the decision is difficult to reverse and involves meaning, identity, or relationships rather than just money.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for career changes, starting a company, moving, ending a relationship, or other life-defining choices where hesitation remains after the practical analysis.
Why use it?
It helps when expected-profit calculations do not capture the real stakes. The method gives emotional and long-term consequences a clear place in major decisions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it for career changes, starting a company, moving, ending a relationship, or other life-defining choices where hesitation remains after the practical analysis.

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

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/regret-minimization"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/regret-minimization.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 137 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,294 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 $0.00137 $0.02294
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.01147
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00459
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00229

Measured 9d ago against content hash c46a7be1c024, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

regret-minimization 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.

regret-minimization/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Regret Minimization

Overview

Most frameworks optimize expected value — pick the highest probability-weighted payoff. That math breaks down for large, asymmetric, life-defining choices where the true unit is not money: career pivots, founding decisions, relocations, relationship exits. There, the decisive question is not "what's the expected payoff?" but "which regret will I be unable to live with at 80?"

Associated with Jeff Bezos (D.E. Shaw → Amazon, 1994); rooted in Stoic Premeditatio Malorum (Seneca, Epistulae Morales 91) and formalized in Regret Theory (Loomes & Sugden, The Economic Journal, 1982).

Compose with neighbors: use first-principles to clarify what is at stake; inversion to surface failure modes; second-order-thinking to verify downstream consequences; then use regret minimization to choose when EV analyses come out close and the true cost is psychological.

When to Use

Apply when: decision is major, hard-to-reverse, asymmetric (career pivot, founding, relocation, relationship, children); EV math feels insufficient because units are joy/meaning/identity; hesitation is emotional, not analytical; user says "what would my 80-year-old self think?", "if I never try this will I regret it?", "I keep hesitating but the math is clear," "should I quit big tech to go all-in on AI / join the AI wave / start a company now (bubble or export-control fears notwithstanding)?"

When NOT to use: routine reversible decisions; EV is genuinely the right unit (portfolio allocation, pricing); framework being re-run weekly (procrastination); both regrets are unlivable (redesign the choice instead).

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: user has a concrete major decision → 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 what-it-is: for big life decisions where math is close or doesn't fit, project to age 80 and ask which path will haunt you more. Commit to the option whose regret you can live with.
  2. Check fit against When to Use / When NOT to use — if it doesn't fit, say so and point elsewhere.
  3. Elicit their real decision. Ask for one if missing; never run the audit on a hypothetical.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Walk The Process one step per turn: describe 80-year-old self → name each path's regret → test asymmetry. Never project for them.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Close by naming the regret they identified as harder to live with, plus the commit date.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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 · 123 lines · 137 tokens per session scan A c46a7be1c024

Subscribe to this mod's changes

regret-minimization is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 137 tokens to every session and 2,294 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

voice-builder

Ingests 5–20 of the user's writing samples and distils a reusable voice-profile.md — signature phrases, sentence-length distribution, opener/closer habits, punctuation quirks, vocabulary do/don't lists, tone sliders, and three calibration paragraphs with self-checks. Other skills load this file so every post sounds…

alebgl77/claude-inc · 110 tokens

english-swe-daily

Daily English expression coach for intermediate software engineers. Use this skill whenever the user wants to improve their spoken or written English in a software engineering work context — especially for standups, Slack messages, 1:1s, meetings, giving feedback on code, asking for help, disagreeing politely, or…

wquguru/skills · 168 tokens

agent-teacher

A teaching aid that explains technical ideas with a small runnable code example and a guided walkthrough. It is meant for learning how something works, not fixing existing code.

JackyYang258/agent-teacher · 151 tokens

lecture-notes

Transform raw lecture content (transcript, plain text, or slides) into clean, structured, study-ready notes in Markdown. Use this skill whenever the user pastes lecture material — a transcript (with or without timestamps), course/lecture text, or slide content — and asks for notes, a summary, or help studying. Also…

ChristinaAndrinopoyloy/claude-skills · 125 tokens

skill-creation-walkthrough

Step-by-step guide for creating your own Claude Skills, from deciding whether a skill is the right tool to writing the SKILL.md file, structuring reference material, and making it trigger reliably. Use when you want to package a workflow, framework, or repeated task into a reusable Skill, when an existing skill is not…

rampstackco/claude-skills · 135 tokens

master-debate

A skill for running an adversarial, multi-round debate between two Buddhist teachers. It is designed for questions where the teachers argue from different positions.

xr843/Master-skill · 127 tokens