representativeness-heuristic

representativeness-heuristic is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 138 tokens per session (1,845 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A mental shortcut that estimates probability by asking how much something resembles a familiar example or stereotype, instead of checking how common that outcome is. The overlooked background rate is called the base rate.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when someone says a person, company, or investment “looks like” a winner. It is also useful for spotting cases where adding more details makes an outcome feel more likely even though it is not.
Why use it?
It helps prevent vivid profiles and success stories from replacing evidence about how often outcomes usually happen. This reduces errors in hiring, investing, product decisions, and startup evaluation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it when someone says a person, company, or investment “looks like” a winner. It is also useful for spotting cases where adding more details makes an outcome feel more likely even though it is not.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/representativeness-heuristic
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 representativeness-heuristic
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 representativeness-heuristic

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/representativeness-heuristic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/representativeness-heuristic.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 1,845 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 $0.01845
Opus 5 $0.00069 $0.00923
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00369
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00185

Measured 9d ago against content hash cf5a99f14c38, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

representativeness-heuristic 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.

representativeness-heuristic/SKILL.md · 117 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 117 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Representativeness Heuristic

Overview

The representativeness heuristic is judging probability by how closely something resembles a prototype — overriding actual base rates. Named by Tversky & Kahneman (1972); produces three systematic errors: base rate neglect, the conjunction fallacy (A-and-B feels more likely than A), and insensitivity to sample size.

Composes with bayesian-reasoning (restores the prior), survivorship-bias (failures are invisible in the prototype), confirmation-bias, and anchoring.

When to Use

  • Evaluating candidates, screening investments, or persona-based product decisions
  • Any probability judgment where a vivid profile or narrative is present
  • When "she/he/it looks like X" drives a decision without a stated base rate
  • Auditing for the conjunction fallacy (more specific = seemingly more likely)
  • Judging AI startups/valuations/capex by resemblance to a prototype ("the next OpenAI/Stripe," AI capex "obviously pays off," AI adoption curves read as durable revenue)

Not when: judgment is purely quantitative; base rate and profile align and Bayesian updating has been done explicitly.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: user has a concrete judgment → audit for base rate neglect and conjunction fallacy immediately.
  • Coach mode: user is unfamiliar → 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: we judge probability by similarity to a prototype, which feels like reasoning but ignores base rates.
  2. Check fit: is a vivid profile driving the judgment? Is a base rate available but being ignored?
  3. Elicit their real case: what is the judgment, what profile is driving it, what is the actual base rate?

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Run The Process one step at a time: state base rate → apply Bayesian update → decompose any conjunction.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Close by naming the calibrated probability that replaced the prototype-matching estimate.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

Read the full file on GitHub · 117 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 · 117 lines · 138 tokens per session scan A cf5a99f14c38

Subscribe to this mod's changes

representativeness-heuristic 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 1,845 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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