Free portable Agent Skill

Forecasting

Produce forecasts that can be challenged and learned from later. Use an outside view, explicit uncertainty, pre-outcome assumptions and a durable forecast record instead of one-point certainty and reconstructed hindsight.

Agent SkillsHermes AgentOpenClawChatGPT SkillsCodex

Open SKILL.md Back to marketplace

What it does

A repeatable workflow, not another bias-name list.

Use it when

A project deadline or outcome estimate is built mostly from an inside plan.
A recent vivid case is driving the probability estimate.
A current feeling or preference is being projected far into the future.
A team wants to learn from forecasts rather than remember them selectively.

It returns

Forecast question and resolution rule
Outside-view reference
Estimate / range and uncertainty
Assumptions and update signals
Timestamped forecast record
Post-resolution review when applicable

Install

One SKILL.md. No API key.

Hermes Agent

mkdir -p ~/.hermes/skills/forecasting && curl -fsSL https://cognitive-biases.github.io/agent-skills/forecasting/SKILL.md -o ~/.hermes/skills/forecasting/SKILL.md

OpenClaw

mkdir -p ~/.openclaw/workspace/skills/forecasting && curl -fsSL https://cognitive-biases.github.io/agent-skills/forecasting/SKILL.md -o ~/.openclaw/workspace/skills/forecasting/SKILL.md

Other Agent Skills-compatible tools

Download SKILL.md and place it in the skill directory supported by your agent. ChatGPT Skills and Codex support the Agent Skills format; their installation surface can vary by product.

Safety boundary

Useful skepticism without amateur diagnosis.

Do not hide weak evidence behind precise decimals.
Do not rewrite the original forecast after the outcome.
Do not treat one correct forecast as proof of a generally good process.
Keep reference-class mismatch visible.

Instruction-only · no secrets · no executable code · no required network access · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Evidence-linked lenses

The skill checks patterns. It does not diagnose people.

Planning Fallacy

The planning fallacy is a well-documented tendency for people to predict their own task completion times too optimistically. The effect has been observed across different kinds of tasks, but it is not a rule that every plan will run late. Project overruns can also come from changing scope, dependencies, incentives, poor data, deliberate underestimation, or genuinely unusual events, so a late project should not automatically be diagnosed as a planning fallacy.

Anchoring Effect

Anchoring is a well-supported effect in which an initial numerical value can pull a later estimate toward it. A 2026 meta-analysis covering 2,601 effect sizes found a large overall effect, but also substantial variation across studies. The effect should not be treated as a rule that every number changes every judgment: incidental anchors, anchors from a different dimension, clearly random values, incentives, and some debiasing conditions were associated with smaller or null effects.

Availability Heuristic

Availability is a judgment heuristic: people can use how easily examples or scenarios come to mind when estimating frequency or probability. That shortcut is not automatically an error because memorable or accessible examples can correlate with real frequency. Bias appears when accessibility is driven by factors that are not diagnostic of the quantity being judged.

Hindsight Bias

Knowing an outcome can make the outcome look more predictable in retrospect. The effect has been studied for decades and across many settings, but it does not mean that every confident explanation after an event is biased.