Analysis Missing Tradeoffs

Analysis presents a single option without comparing alternatives or articulating the costs of the chosen approach.

Security Scan

This is an instruction-only guidance skill whose requirements and runtime instructions match its stated purpose and do not request extra credentials, binaries, or installs.

Purpose & Capability

Name/description ask for analyses that surface alternatives and tradeoffs; SKILL.md contains explicit instructions to enumerate options, costs, decision criteria and show work. No unrelated resources are requested.

Instruction Scope

SKILL.md stays on-topic: it instructs the agent how to structure analysis and what to include. It does not direct the agent to read system files, fetch external secrets, or transmit data to unexpected endpoints.

Install Mechanism

No install spec and no code files — the skill is instruction-only, so nothing is written to disk or pulled from external URLs.

Credentials

The skill requires no environment variables, credentials, or config paths; requested access is proportionate to its purpose.

Persistence & Privilege

always is false and the skill is user-invocable. It can be invoked autonomously by the agent (platform default), which is appropriate for a guidance-style skill and does not increase its footprint.

Assessment

This skill is coherent and low-risk: it's just instructions for producing analyses that list alternatives and tradeoffs. Because it's instruction-only, it doesn't request secrets or install code. As with any guidance skill, review its outputs for correctness and bias before acting on them. If you plan to allow autonomous agent use, be aware the agent may call this skill without manual prompts — fine here, but consider governance if you combine it with skills that perform actions or access sensitive data.

An analysis that skips comparison reads as advocacy, not analysis. The reader can't tell whether you considered and rejected alternatives or simply didn't see them, so they can't trust the recommendation.

Symptoms

• Analysis proposes one approach and frames it as obviously correct.
• Costs and limitations of the chosen approach are not discussed.
• No mention of alternatives that a knowledgeable reader would have considered.
• Conclusion reads "we should do X" with no "rather than Y because Z".

What to do

• Enumerate at least two viable options. If only one is viable, say why the others were eliminated.
• For each option, list what you gain and what you give up. Costs include complexity, risk, cost of reversal, team unfamiliarity — not just performance numbers.
• State the decision criteria up front: what matters most here (latency? cost? time to ship? blast radius?). Apply the criteria consistently across options.
• Show your work. The reader should be able to change one assumption and see which option wins.
• When the right answer is genuinely obvious, still name the alternatives and dismiss them briefly. Obvious-to-you is not obvious-to-everyone.