deciqAI Knowledge Skills

Open-source thinking-framework skills that make rigorous reasoning executable for AI agents.

233 composable mental models — packaged as installable Agent Skills. Each turns a reasoning method that usually lives in a book into a step-by-step process an AI agent can actually run, with worked historical examples and cited sources.

License: MIT · Built by deciqAI · Contributions welcome

Install

Add all 233 skills:

npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills

List what's inside, or grab a single skill:

npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --list
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill first-principles

Each folder is also a self-contained SKILL.md with examples/ and references/ — copy it into your agent's skills directory directly if you prefer.

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The skills

Skill Live What it does
10 10 10 ↗ Faced with a non-trivial decision, ask three questions: How will I feel in 10 minutes? In 10 months? In 10 years? The three horizons are spaced an order of magnitude apart to surfa
Aarrr Pirate Metrics ↗ A startup's growth is a sequential funnel — each stage gates the next.
Abductive Reasoning ↗ Abduction — inference to the best explanation — is the only mode of reasoning that introduces new ideas.
Activation Onboarding Playbook ↗ Activation is the moment a new user first experiences real value — the "aha moment" — and the single biggest lever on retention and revenue for most products/services.
Anchoring ↗ When people estimate an unknown quantity they start from a reference point — an anchor — and adjust.
Ansoff Matrix ↗ Every growth option a firm has falls into one of four quadrants defined by two axes: existing vs.
Antifragile ↗ Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012) identified a third response to stress beyond fragile/robust: antifragile — systems that gain from disorder, with bounded downside and unbounded upside.
Ar Dso Discipline ↗ Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) is the average time to collect after a sale.
Arrow Information Paradox ↗ You have something valuable to sell — a technology, a formula, a method, a dataset, a research result.
Authority Bias ↗ Authority bias is the automatic tendency to comply with directives from authority figures — often overriding one's own judgment, ethics, or evidence.
Availability Heuristic ↗ The availability heuristic: people estimate probability by how easily examples come to mind.
Batna Zopa ↗ BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) is the value of your best fallback if no deal happens — the floor below which you walk away.
Bayesian Reasoning ↗ Bayes' theorem: Posterior odds = Prior odds × Likelihood ratio.
Bcg Matrix ↗ Maps each business unit on a 2×2 grid of market growth rate vs.
Black Swan ↗ Taleb (2007): a black swan is (1) outside all prior expectations, (2) extreme impact, (3) obvious in hindsight only.
Blue Ocean Strategy ↗ Most competitive strategy assumes industry boundaries are fixed.
Bootstrapping Vs Raising ↗ Raising venture capital is not a milestone; it's a choice that commits you to a specific outcome — a large, fast, high-multiple exit — because that's the only outcome that pays bac
Bullseye Traction Channels ↗ From Traction (Weinberg & Mares, 2014): most startups die from lack of distribution, not product, and they fail because they over-invest in one favored channel instead of systemati
Business Model Canvas ↗ A business creates, delivers, and captures value through nine interlocking blocks (Customer Segments, Value Propositions, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Res
Cash Conversion Cycle ↗ The cash conversion cycle (CCC) measures how long cash is trapped between paying suppliers and collecting from customers: CCC = DIO (days inventory) + DSO (days receivables) − DPO
Change And Constants ↗ Every strategy contains elements that must change and elements that must not.
Checklist ↗ A checklist is a short written list of must-not-skip steps for a complex repeated operation.
Chestertons Fence ↗ Before removing a rule, process, code path, or institution — you must understand why it was put there.
Circle Of Competence ↗ Every decision-maker has a domain where judgments are reliable (inside the circle) and one where they are not (outside).
Cognitive Evolution Stages ↗ Most learning models treat acquisition as the final destination.
Cognitive Load Theory ↗ Working memory holds ~4 chunks of novel information — a hard limit.
Cognitive Science Landscape ↗ Eight interconnected domains constitute human cognition: (1) Perception & Attention, (2) Memory, (3) Language & Thought, (4) Decision Making & Judgment, (5) Metacognition, (6) Emot
Commitment Consistency ↗ Small commitments today dramatically raise the probability of large commitments tomorrow — people have a strong drive to behave consistently with prior choices, especially ones tha
Comparative Advantage ↗ Mutually beneficial specialization depends on relative productivity, not absolute.
Compound Interest ↗ Compound interest: a quantity grows at a rate proportional to its current size — growth itself grows — producing exponential accumulation.
Confirmation Bias ↗ Confirmation bias is the systematic tendency to seek, interpret, remember, and weight evidence in ways that support existing beliefs — and to correspondingly miss disconfirming evi
Content Led Growth ↗ Content-led growth turns a website into a compounding acquisition asset by covering the topics your buyers search, organized as pillar + cluster pages that build topical authority.
Continuous Discovery ↗ Continuous discovery (Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits, 2021) replaces one-off research with a weekly cadence of customer touchpoints by the team building the product, st
Contrarian Question ↗ Peter Thiel opens Zero to One (2014) with an interview question he says he asks constantly: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" Its business translation as
Critical Thinking ↗ Critical thinking evaluates a conclusion by explicitly testing it against alternative interpretations — the conclusion that survives the most disconfirmation attempts is the one to
Cross Disciplinary Creativity ↗ Importing an actual mechanism from a foreign domain and applying it structurally to a home-domain problem — producing a configuration no expert in either field could conceive alone
Curiosity Learning Curve ↗ Biological learning capacity remains measurable into the 70s and 80s.
Customer Relationship Ladder ↗ Most B2B teams treat relationship deepening as an attitude problem — be friendlier, schedule more QBRs.
Customs Adcvd Tariff Exposure ↗
Customs Duty Optimization Opportunity Cost ↗
Customs Hts Classification Mece ↗
Customs Origin Usmca Decision ↗
Customs Reasonable Care Isf Checklist ↗
Cynefin ↗ Cynefin (pronounced "kuh-NEV-in"; Welsh for "habitat") is a sense-making framework by Dave Snowden (IBM, 1999).
Death Spiral ↗ A death spiral is a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop in competitive markets.
Decision Tree ↗ A decision tree maps a multi-stage decision: decision nodes (squares) for choices you control, chance nodes (circles) for outcomes you don't, probabilities on every branch, payoffs
Deep Work ↗ Cal Newport's framework (2016): deep work = undistracted, cognitively demanding activity that creates hard-to-replicate value; shallow work = logistical, responsive, easy-to-replic
Definite Optimism ↗ In Zero to One (2014, ch.
Deliberate Practice ↗ Most people confuse repetition with learning — they accumulate years of experience and plateau.
Demand Leadership ↗ The highest-value market position is not to fulfill demand but to define it — to become the entity whose framing of the problem the customer adopts as their own.
Design Thinking ↗ Design thinking — formalized by Tim Brown at IDEO and Stanford's d.school, grounded in Simon (1969) and Rittel's "wicked problems" — replaces assumption-driven decisions with evide
Dichotomy Of Control ↗ Separate what is within your power (judgments, intentions, voluntary actions) from what is not (outcomes, others' actions, external events) — then direct effort to the first and ac
Discovery Call Spin ↗ SPIN Selling (Neil Rackham, from large-sale research) structures a discovery call around four question types in order — Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff — so the buyer
Disruptive Innovation ↗ Most incumbents fail not because they make bad decisions, but because they make good ones.
Do Things That Dont Scale ↗ Paul Graham's counterintuitive rule: early on, the unscalable is exactly what you should do.
Door In The Face ↗ Ask for something large (expect refusal), then retreat to the smaller request you actually wanted.
Dual System Thinking ↗ Two parallel modes: System 1 — fast, automatic, effortless (pattern recognition, gut feel).
Dunbars Number ↗ Dunbar's number (~150) is the cognitive limit on stable social groups the human neocortex can sustain, with nested layers at ~5, ~15, ~50, then outer bands at ~500 and ~1,500.
Dunning Kruger ↗ The Dunning-Kruger effect is the systematic self-assessment asymmetry demonstrated by Kruger & Dunning (1999): bottom-quartile performers overestimate rank by ~50 percentile points
Dynamic Core Competence ↗ Core competence (Prahalad & Hamel, 1990) becomes dynamic when you recognize that competences decay, markets change what they reward, and building sequence matters.
Economic Moat ↗ An economic moat is the durable, structural competitive advantage that protects a business's returns on capital from being competed away.
Economies Of Scale ↗ Average cost per unit falls as output rises — fixed costs spread thinner, specialization deepens, and learning compounds.
Emergence ↗ Emergence: many interacting parts produce whole-level properties that cannot be predicted from the parts alone.
Endowment Effect ↗ People demand roughly 2× more to give up something they own than they would pay to acquire the identical thing — purely because they own it.
Estimated Tax Safety Buffer ↗
Expected Value And Kelly ↗ Two questions decide most repeated bets: is this bet good? (EV) and how big? (Kelly).
Falsifiability ↗ A meaningful empirical claim must specify what observations would refute it.
Feedback Loops ↗ A system has a feedback loop when its output circles back as input to the next cycle.
Feynman Technique ↗ The Feynman Technique tests whether understanding is genuine (can reproduce, predict, extend) or surface (can recognize, recall jargon).
First Mover Advantage ↗ Lieberman and Montgomery's 1988 landmark paper established both the mechanisms of first-mover advantage and, with equal rigor, the mechanisms of first-mover disadvantage that make
First Principles ↗ Most reasoning is reasoning by analogy: X resembles Y, so do what Y does.
Founder Burnout Sustainability ↗ In a small company the founder is the critical infrastructure: when their energy, health, or judgment fails, the company fails.
Founder Led Sales ↗ Before product-market fit, the founder must run sales personally — not because it scales, but because it's the fastest, highest-fidelity discovery loop and the only way to learn wh
Founder Mindset ↗ A specific cognitive mode for running an early-stage company — different from manager mindset (optimizing known systems) and employee mindset (executing within fixed scope).
Founder Trajectory Matrix ↗ Founders diverge along two behavioral axes: (1) actively seeking mentors vs.
Framing Effect ↗ The framing effect: logically equivalent descriptions of the same decision produce different choices depending on whether outcomes are cast as gains or losses.
Freight Carrier Vetting Checklist ↗
Freight Double Brokering Exposure ↗
Freight Lane Pricing Decision ↗
Freight Shipper Carrier Principal Agent ↗
Fundamental Attribution Error ↗ The fundamental attribution error (FAE) is the systematic tendency to over-weight character factors and under-weight situational factors when explaining others' behavior — while re
Goodharts Law ↗ Goodhart's Law: when a metric controls behavior, people optimize the metric rather than the underlying goal.
Gravity Field Empowerment ↗ Most improvement frameworks measure interventions by immediate effect — quarter-over-quarter lift, year-one ROI.
Halo Effect ↗ A single positive or negative impression biases judgments of all unrelated attributes.
Hanlons Razor ↗ Before assuming someone hurt you on purpose, construct the version where they made a mistake — and see how much evidence it explains.
Herzberg Two Factor ↗ Herzberg's 1959 Pittsburgh study found satisfaction and dissatisfaction are two independent axes.
Hidden Elite Advantages ↗ Top performers' results stem from nine hidden advantage dimensions — not visible actions.
Hindsight Bias ↗ Hindsight bias — the "I knew it all along" effect — is the tendency, after learning an outcome, to misremember your prior judgment as having been closer to that outcome than it act
Hyperbolic Discounting ↗ People discount the near future far more steeply than the distant future, producing dynamically inconsistent preferences: patient choices for next month reverse when next month arr
Incentive Design ↗ Behavior follows incentives more reliably than character, intent, or training.
Incremental Vs Leap Growth ↗ The most common strategic error is applying the wrong growth mode to a goal.
Industry Learning Sprint ↗ A structured 3-step process (financial reports → expert dialogue → unique view) for building a working industry mental model in approximately one week.
Insurance Agent Compliance Checklist ↗
Insurance Coverage Gap Premortem ↗
Insurance Renewal Retention Ladder ↗
Insurance Suitability Principal Agent ↗
Intrinsic Drive ↗ Intrinsic motivation is a portfolio of distinct sources — not a binary switch.
Inversion ↗ Most planning asks "how do I win?" and runs forward from there.
Jobs To Be Done ↗ People don't buy products — they hire products to do a job (make progress in a specific circumstance, across functional, emotional, and social dimensions).
K Factor Viral ↗ K = i × c, where i = average invites per existing user, c = conversion rate into new activated users.
Knowing And Doing As One ↗ When you say "I know I should but I just don't do it," the standard explanation is a failure of willpower.
Kotter Change ↗ John Kotter built this model from studying one hundred corporate transformations — most failed.
Landing Page Conversion ↗ A landing page converts when a visitor, in seconds, understands what it is, who it's for, why it's better, and what to do next — with nothing in the way.
Last Mover Advantage ↗ Most founders and strategists treat "first" as the prize: enter before anyone else and the market is yours.
Lateral Thinking ↗ Lateral thinking is the discipline of solving problems by approaching them from unexpected angles — not by going deeper along an existing logical path but by moving sideways to a n
Latticework ↗ Latticework is the practice of cross-wiring mental models from multiple disciplines on the same situation.
Lean Startup ↗ A startup is a temporary organization searching for a repeatable, scalable business model under extreme uncertainty (Steve Blank).
Lifestage Value Curve ↗ Different life stages create different competitive advantages and demand different investments.
Lindy Effect ↗ For non-perishable items — ideas, books, technologies, institutions, practices — life expectancy is proportional to current age.
Logical Fallacies ↗ A fallacy is an argument that looks like it works but doesn't.
Loss Aversion Prospect Theory ↗ People evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point (not absolute wealth), weight losses ~2.25x as heavily as equivalent gains, are risk-averse in gain frames and risk-seeking i
Manager Development Spectrum ↗ Most leadership programs target skill acquisition.
Map Is Not The Territory ↗ Any representation — metric, model, strategy deck, org chart, or process manual — is a selective, simplified, aging abstraction.
Margin Of Safety ↗ Benjamin Graham introduced margin of safety in Security Analysis (1934)