Lab Notebook Skills

Claude Code skills plugin that turns a code agent into a responsible researcher. Today the plugin enforces experiment isolation and lab-notebook journaling discipline; it is designed to grow into a broader researcher-hygiene toolkit (hypothesis registration, literature review, data provenance, statistical rigor, reproducibility checklist).

Skills

Skill	Triggers on
`experiment-layout`	Creating a new experiment dir, adding a variant cell, or tempted to rename / delete / edit a prior `experiments/expNN_*` directory
`cell-source-isolation`	Writing or editing source files inside an `experiments/expNN_*/eNNx/` cell directory, or about to add a `_lib/` / `utils/` / `helpers/` directory under `experiments/`
`lab-journal-discipline`	Designing a new experiment (read `experiments/NOTES.md` first) or a cell run just finished and its metrics are committed (append entry)

Planned

Names are illustrative and may change.

Skill	Purpose
`literature-review-before-design`	Before drafting an experiment, surface prior work that already answers (or constrains) the question.
`hypothesis-pre-registration`	Record the hypothesis and the metric that decides it before the run, separately from results.
`data-provenance`	Track dataset version, preprocessing, and split definitions as first-class artifacts of each cell.
`statistical-rigor`	Multiple-comparison discipline, effect-size reporting, noise-vs-signal sanity checks.
`reproducibility-checklist`	Pre-publish / pre-merge checklist that the code another reader runs produces the recorded numbers.

Installation

Via marketplace

Open Claude Code by running claude in your terminal, then:

/plugin marketplace add whats2000/nchc-marketplace
/plugin install lab-notebook-skills@nchc-marketplace

Updating

/plugin marketplace update nchc-marketplace
/plugin update lab-notebook-skills@nchc-marketplace

Local development

To iterate on this plugin locally, point Claude Code's marketplace at the checkout instead of GitHub:

/plugin marketplace add /path/to/nchc-marketplace
/plugin install lab-notebook-skills@nchc-marketplace

After editing skill files, restart Claude Code (/exit then claude) to pick up the changes.

Why these skills

Reproducibility usually fails for prosaic reasons: a shared helper file got edited mid-experiment and silently changed the behavior of three prior cells; the lab-notebook entry was drafted before the run and quietly turned into "what I expected" instead of "what I observed"; a prior failed variant gets re-run because nobody read the notes. The skills here are written to make those specific failures hard.

License

MIT

lab-notebook-skills

Popularity

What's Inside

README