s4h-economics-opportunity-cost

s4h-economics-opportunity-cost is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 90 tokens per session (1,647 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for measuring the real cost of a choice by considering the best alternative you give up.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare competing uses of resources when deciding what to pursue, postpone, or abandon.
Why use it?
It reveals the value lost through time, money, attention, or resources that are committed elsewhere, including the cost of doing nothing.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skills-for-humanity plugin — 197 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to compare competing uses of resources when deciding what to pursue, postpone, or abandon.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-economics-opportunity-cost
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 human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-economics-opportunity-cost
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills-for-humanity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 197 skills, 1 hook.

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 s4h-economics-opportunity-cost

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-economics-opportunity-cost/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-economics-opportunity-cost)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-economics-opportunity-cost"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-economics-opportunity-cost/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 s4h-economics-opportunity-cost

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-economics-opportunity-cost"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-economics-opportunity-cost.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,647 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 8
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 90
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00090 $0.01647
Opus 5 $0.00045 $0.00823
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00329
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00165

Measured 9d ago against content hash 52878412a59a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

s4h-economics-opportunity-cost 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.

skills/s4h-economics-opportunity-cost/SKILL.md · 109 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 109 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Economics: Opportunity Cost

Alfred Marshall gave us the concept; every decision-maker needs it. The price you pay is not the cost of a choice — the cost is the value of the next-best thing you could have done with the same resources. Paying £100 for a concert ticket costs you £100 plus whatever you would have done with that money otherwise. Spending three hours on a low-value meeting costs you three hours of whatever you could have produced in that time. Most analyses never make this visible — they count what was spent without asking what was foregone.

Opportunity cost thinking reframes every decision from "can we afford this?" to "is this the best available use of what we have?" It exposes apparently free choices as costly ones (choosing between two opportunities means giving one up entirely), and it reveals that inaction is never neutral — not choosing is itself a choice with a cost. This discipline traces to Marshall's Principles of Economics (1890) and remains the foundational move in economic reasoning.

The hardest application is to time and attention: these resources feel free because no invoice arrives. But time spent on one thing is precisely time not spent on another. Opportunity cost makes the invoice visible.


Your Process

Step 1: Define the choice Clarify what decision is being made and what resource is being allocated — money, time, capital, headcount, attention, or some combination. Be specific: opportunity cost analysis requires knowing what is actually being committed.

Framing check: Confirm the choice and the resource being committed before continuing. State what you've identified in one sentence, then use AskUserQuestion:

  • Question: "I'm reading this as: [one-sentence framing — the specific choice and the resource being committed]. Is that right?"
  • Header: "Framing"
  • Options:
    • Yes — proceed — framing is correct
    • Adjust — one element is off; user will correct it before you continue
    • Reframe — different situation than read; incorporate the correction before proceeding

Read the full file on GitHub · 109 lines

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 · 109 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A 52878412a59a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-economics-opportunity-cost is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 1,647 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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