Is this skill only for financial decisions?

No, it is designed for any resource-constrained scenario, including developer time allocation, team focus, and software architectural choices.

Can this skill help with technical debt management?

Yes, it helps calculate whether the long-term benefits of a refactor outweigh the immediate opportunity cost of delayed feature delivery.

How does it help avoid the Sunk Cost Fallacy?

The framework focuses on future value and the next best alternative, helping users ignore past investments that cannot be recovered and are irrelevant to future gains.

What is the main benefit of using the Opportunity Cost skill?

It reveals the hidden value of what you give up when making a choice, ensuring your scarce resources—time, money, and attention—are used for the most impactful alternative.

Opportunity Cost Decision Framework

Name: Opportunity Cost Decision Framework
Author: lev-os

bylev-os

0•

Productivity & Workflow

Evaluates the hidden trade-offs and value of forgone alternatives to optimize technical and strategic decision-making.

The Opportunity Cost skill implements a structured mental model for evaluating the true price of any decision by formalizing the value of the next best alternative. By transforming implicit trade-offs into explicit comparisons, this skill helps developers and managers navigate complex choices—such as feature prioritization, tech stack selection, or time allocation—ensuring that resources are directed toward the highest-value outcomes while accounting for the invisible costs of what is left behind.

Key Features

01Structured framework for identifying and ranking viable alternatives

020 GitHub stars

03Quantitative calculation of true cost including direct and hidden expenses

04Strategic analysis for product roadmap and technical debt prioritization

05Resource allocation guidance for time, attention, and capital

06Anti-pattern detection for sunk cost fallacy and status quo bias

Use Cases

01Evaluating architectural decisions where choosing one path forecloses others

02Deciding between refactoring legacy code versus shipping new functionality

03Prioritizing engineering tasks by evaluating the value of features not built

What are Skills?·How to Install

Install with 🐟 Skill.Fish

npx skillfish add lev-os/agents opportunity-cost

For use in Claude.ai and ChatGPT

Download Skill