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Jupyter Notebook

  • 73 installs
  • 71.3k repo stars
  • Updated July 29, 2026
  • microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners

This is a copy of jupyter-notebook by openai - installs and ranking accrue to the original listing.

Spin up structured Jupyter notebooks with objectives, runnable cells, and takeaways when you are learning agents or validating an ML idea before production code.

About

Jupyter Notebook is a template-style agent skill from Microsoft’s AI Agents for Beginners track. It tells your coding agent to produce `.ipynb`-style notebooks organized for solo builders who need to try an agent or ML idea without jumping straight into a repo-wide implementation. The bundled structure starts with an experiment title and objective, adds a setup cell with imports and a fixed random seed for reproducibility, then a Plan section for hypothesis and metrics before you fill in analysis code. That rhythm fits indie hackers validating prompts, comparing small model behaviors, or publishing tutorial cells alongside a course repo. Use it when you want the agent to scaffold learning and measurement artifacts instead of a single script dump. It pairs naturally with documentation and later Build-phase hardening once the notebook proves the approach.

  • Default prompt asks for clear sections, runnable cells, and concise takeaways
  • Starter template includes Objective, Plan (hypothesis, sweep variables, metrics), and reproducibility seed cell
  • Markdown + code cell pattern suited to tutorials and agent-learning walkthroughs
  • Interface metadata targets Jupyter as the display surface for experiments

Jupyter Notebook by the numbers

  • 73 all-time installs (skills.sh)
  • +3 installs in the week ending Aug 4, 2026 (Skillselion tracking)
  • Security screen: MEDIUM risk (skills.sh audit)
  • Data as of Aug 5, 2026 (Skillselion catalog sync)
npx skills add https://github.com/microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners --skill jupyter-notebook

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Listed on Skillselion
Installs73
repo stars71.3k
Security audit3 / 3 scanners passed
Last updatedJuly 29, 2026
Repositorymicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners

What it does

Spin up structured Jupyter notebooks with objectives, runnable cells, and takeaways when you are learning agents or validating an ML idea before production code.

Files

SKILL.mdMarkdownGitHub ↗

Jupyter Notebook Skill

Create clean, reproducible Jupyter notebooks for two primary modes:

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

Prefer the bundled templates and the helper script for consistent structure and fewer JSON mistakes.

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"

User-scoped skills install under $CODEX_HOME/skills (default: ~/.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

3. 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.

4. Apply the right pattern. For experiments, follow references/experiment-patterns.md. For tutorials, follow references/tutorial-patterns.md.

5. 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.

6. 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.

Script path:

  • $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)

Prefer uv for dependency management.

Optional Python packages for local notebook execution:

uv pip install jupyterlab ipykernel

The bundled scaffold script uses only the Python standard library and does not require extra dependencies.

Environment

No required environment variables.

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.

Related skills

FAQ

Is Jupyter Notebook safe to install?

skills.sh reports 3 of 3 security scanners passed. Review the Security Audits panel on this page before installing in production.

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