status-quo-bias

status-quo-bias is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 128 tokens per session (1,923 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A framework for spotting the tendency to prefer the current option simply because it is familiar. It treats leaving things unchanged as an active decision with possible costs, not as neutral inaction.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review strategies, vendors, products, policies, and system defaults. It can support decisions about whether changing or keeping the current arrangement best serves people's goals.
Why use it?
It helps teams notice when “we have always done it this way” is standing in for evidence. It is also useful for designing defaults, where the preselected choice strongly affects what people do.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to review strategies, vendors, products, policies, and system defaults. It can support decisions about whether changing or keeping the current arrangement best serves people's goals.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/status-quo-bias
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 status-quo-bias
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 status-quo-bias

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/status-quo-bias"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/status-quo-bias.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 128 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,923 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 $0.00128 $0.01923
Opus 5 $0.00064 $0.00962
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00385
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00192

Measured 9d ago against content hash a74158820bf7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

status-quo-bias 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.

status-quo-bias/SKILL.md · 113 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 113 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Status Quo Bias

Overview

Status quo bias is the systematic preference for the current state over available alternatives — even when alternatives are objectively superior by the person's own values. "Doing nothing" is an active decision to accept the current state with real opportunity costs, not a non-choice. Coined by Samuelson & Zeckhauser (1988). Organ donation consent rates of 4–99% across European countries differ almost entirely by whether the default is opt-in or opt-out.

Two directions: (1) Design — choose defaults that serve user interests, not historical accident; (2) Audit — recognize when you are defaulting rather than actively choosing. Composes with endowment-effect, loss-aversion-prospect-theory, inversion, first-principles.

When to Use

  • A strategy, product, vendor, or policy has been in place without explicit re-evaluation
  • Team says "we've always done it this way" or "changing now would be disruptive"
  • A product or system default needs to be designed or redesigned
  • Decision-maker is "leaning toward no change" but cannot articulate a positive case for the status quo
  • Benefits elections, 401(k) enrollment, subscription renewals, or governance votes are being designed
  • An organization is deferring AI adoption — defaulting to incumbent SaaS/vendors or existing workflows over AI-native alternatives, or waiting on AI capex/adoption decisions — and framing the delay as prudence

Not when: status quo was explicitly evaluated and found optimal; primary mechanism is risk aversion (use loss-aversion-prospect-theory).

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: user has a concrete decision or design problem → run The Process directly.
  • Coach mode: user is encountering organizational inertia or is new to the framework → guide step by step.

Read the full file on GitHub · 113 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 · 113 lines · 128 tokens per session scan A a74158820bf7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

status-quo-bias is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 128 tokens to every session and 1,923 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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