Individual skill
thinking-margin-of-safety
When provisioning, setting a limit, or committing an estimate under uncertainty, size a buffer to residual error and the cost of breach—not to the optimistic edge.
skills/thinking-margin-of-safety/SKILL.md
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- ai-tools Repository topic
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# Margin of Safety
Core rule: commit a buffered number when residual uncertainty plus breach cost can cause ruin or costly failure. Margin covers estimation error; it is not free slack for laziness.
## When to Use
- Capacity, timeouts, pool sizes, queue depths, storage, or SLA numbers under load uncertainty
- Timeline or budget commitments where underestimation is costly
- Architecture headroom when scaling or recovery is slow
- Any public or production commitment where being wrong has asymmetric downside
## When NOT to Use
- Breach is detected immediately and fixed near-zero cost (fast auto-scale, live-tunable limit)—static fat buffers waste resources