tracking-beliefs

tracking-beliefs is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from romainsimon/skills-for-decision-making. It costs 84 tokens per session (1,617 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for interpreting noisy measurements by comparing possible explanations and updating confidence as new evidence arrives.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a business metric moves and you need to decide whether the change is real, why it happened, and whether to act.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish a real change from random variation, reporting delays, tracking problems, or other misleading readings.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is node scripts/calc.js track metric.json.

Good fit Use it when a business metric moves and you need to decide whether the change is real, why it happened, and whether to act.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/romainsimon/skills-for-decision-making
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/romainsimon/skills-for-decision-making/tracking-beliefs

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 tracking-beliefs

README.md
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Your own site
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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 tracking-beliefs

Your own site · 80×15
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Per session 84 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,617 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.
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 $0.00084 $0.01617
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00809
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00323
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00162

Measured 12d ago against content hash 3f91436f150d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

tracking-beliefs 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 12d 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.

tracking-beliefs/SKILL.md · 169 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 169 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Tracking beliefs

You never observe the state of the business. You observe noisy readings of it. Revenue lags settlement, refunds and disputes arrive late, annual plans lump, analytics drops traffic to blockers and bots, and attribution is approximate everywhere.

Two operations, and almost every metric argument needs one of them:

  • Filtering - given a series of noisy readings, what is the underlying level, and is the latest move larger than noise explains?
  • Updating - given evidence, how should belief shift across competing explanations?

Workflow

- [ ] 1. Say what you are actually measuring, and what the reading is a proxy for
- [ ] 2. Decide whether the latest move is real
- [ ] 3. If it is real, list the explanations before looking for evidence
- [ ] 4. Update on the evidence
- [ ] 5. Act only when the belief is concentrated enough to matter

1. Reading versus state

Write both lines:

  • State (unobserved): "how much recurring revenue we are actually earning."
  • Reading (observed): "what Stripe reported as settled this week."

The gap between them is the noise model, and naming it usually resolves the argument before any maths. A weekly revenue reading with settlement lag and refunds has several percent of noise on it before anything real has happened.

2. Is the move real?

node scripts/calc.js track metric.json

Input shape: examples/track.json. The filter separates drift in the true level from measurement noise and reports, per reading, whether it fell outside what drift alone explains.

Read two things: the current level with its interval, and whether the latest reading is surprising. A reading inside the band is not evidence of anything and should not start a project. That single check kills most metric panic.

Supply processVar and observationVar when you know them. Without them the tool guesses from the series itself and says so; the guess is a starting point, not a measurement.

The intuition for the two numbers: observationVar is how much the reading bounces when nothing changed - measurable by reading the same period twice, days apart, and seeing how much it moves. processVar is how much the true level genuinely drifts per period.

Read the full file on GitHub · 169 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 12d ago First seen · 169 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A 3f91436f150d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tracking-beliefs is a skill published in the GitHub repository romainsimon/skills-for-decision-making (11 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 1,617 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.