Skills For Decision Making

Skills for Decision Making

Agent skills built from Algorithms for Decision Making.

Most business advice is vibes in a confident tone.This is the arithmetic underneath it.

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Your agent already gives confident business advice. It will tell you to run the A/B test, match the competitor's price cut, and kill the product with no conversions. Sometimes that advice is right. You cannot tell which times, because there is no number under it.

These eight skills put the number under it.

> The team wants three weeks to build a churn prediction model.
  It flags at-risk accounts with 92% accuracy. Worth it?

Value of information: zero. Not low. Zero.

You already send the retention email to everyone in the at-risk segment, and the email costs nothing, so emailing everyone is already the optimal action. There is no prediction the model could return that changes what you do, and an observation that cannot change the action has no value however accurate it is. The 92% is doing rhetorical work, not decision work.

This becomes worth building the day the retention action has a real per-customer cost, because then you have to choose who to spend it on. Test that first: it is cheaper than three weeks of engineering.

That is the whole idea. Eight situations you actually face, eight skills, a calculator behind each one.

What it is

Markdown skills that work with any agent that can read files: Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Aider. Each skill is backed by a zero-dependency Node calculator, so beta posteriors and expected utilities get computed rather than guessed in prose.

The source is Algorithms for Decision Making by Mykel Kochenderfer, Tim Wheeler and Kyle Wray (MIT Press, 2022): 700 pages on acting under uncertainty, written for collision-avoidance systems and Mars rovers. The mathematics is aimed at aircraft. The problem structure is the one an operator faces every week.

references/book-map.md maps every technique chapter to where it lands, including an honest list of what does not transfer and a suggested reading order if you only read six chapters.

What it is not

• Not a forecasting or BI tool. It does no data collection and connects to nothing. You bring the numbers; it tells you what follows from them.
• Not an oracle. Several of the calculators depend on utilities and priors you supply, and they say so in their own output. The value is that those inputs become visible and arguable instead of buried in someone's prose.
• Not a replacement for judgement. Two of the eight skills exist mainly to tell you that a question is a values decision, or that you should stop analysing and ship.
• Not a port of the book's machinery. Policy gradients, neural value approximation and exact POMDP solvers are in the book and deliberately not here. references/book-map.md says which parts do not transfer and why.

Install

Paste into your agent:

Install all the skills from the github repo
https://github.com/romainsimon/skills-for-decision-making
Then read references/book-map.md and tell me which of my open decisions each one covers.

Or clone it: