Jupyter Notebook Skill

• Experiments and exploratory analysis
• Tutorials and teaching-oriented walkthroughs

When to use

• Create a new

  .ipynb

  notebook from scratch.
• Convert rough notes or scripts into a structured notebook.
• Refactor an existing notebook to be more reproducible and skimmable.
• Build experiments or tutorials that will be read or re-run by other people.

Decision tree

• If the request is exploratory, analytical, or hypothesis-driven, choose

  experiment

  .
• If the request is instructional, step-by-step, or audience-specific, choose

  tutorial

  .
• If editing an existing notebook, treat it as a refactor: preserve intent and improve structure.

Skill path (set once)

export CODEX_HOME="${CODEX_HOME:-$HOME/.codex}"
export JUPYTER_NOTEBOOK_CLI="$CODEX_HOME/skills/jupyter-notebook/scripts/new_notebook.py"

$CODEX_HOME/skills

~/.codex/skills

Workflow

1. Lock the intent. Identify the notebook kind:

   experiment

   or

   tutorial

   . Capture the objective, audience, and what "done" looks like.
2. Scaffold from the template. Use the helper script to avoid hand-authoring raw notebook JSON.

uv run --python 3.12 python "$JUPYTER_NOTEBOOK_CLI" \
  --kind experiment \
  --title "Compare prompt variants" \
  --out output/jupyter-notebook/compare-prompt-variants.ipynb

uv run --python 3.12 python "$JUPYTER_NOTEBOOK_CLI" \
  --kind tutorial \
  --title "Intro to embeddings" \
  --out output/jupyter-notebook/intro-to-embeddings.ipynb

1. Fill the notebook with small, runnable steps. Keep each code cell focused on one step. Add short markdown cells that explain the purpose and expected result. Avoid large, noisy outputs when a short summary works.
2. Apply the right pattern. For experiments, follow

   references/experiment-patterns.md

   . For tutorials, follow

   references/tutorial-patterns.md

   .
3. Edit safely when working with existing notebooks. Preserve the notebook structure; avoid reordering cells unless it improves the top-to-bottom story. Prefer targeted edits over full rewrites. If you must edit raw JSON, review

   references/notebook-structure.md

   first.
4. Validate the result. Run the notebook top-to-bottom when the environment allows. If execution is not possible, say so explicitly and call out how to validate locally. Use the final pass checklist in

   references/quality-checklist.md

   .

Templates and helper script

• Templates live in

  assets/experiment-template.ipynb

  and

  assets/tutorial-template.ipynb

  .
• The helper script loads a template, updates the title cell, and writes a notebook.

• $JUPYTER_NOTEBOOK_CLI

  (installed default:

  $CODEX_HOME/skills/jupyter-notebook/scripts/new_notebook.py

  )

Temp and output conventions

• Use

  tmp/jupyter-notebook/

  for intermediate files; delete when done.
• Write final artifacts under

  output/jupyter-notebook/

  when working in this repo.
• Use stable, descriptive filenames (for example,

  ablation-temperature.ipynb

  ).

Dependencies (install only when needed)

uv

uv pip install jupyterlab ipykernel

Environment

Reference map

• references/experiment-patterns.md

  : experiment structure and heuristics.

• references/tutorial-patterns.md

  : tutorial structure and teaching flow.

• references/notebook-structure.md

  : notebook JSON shape and safe editing rules.

• references/quality-checklist.md

  : final validation checklist.