experiment-scaffold

name	experiment-scaffold
description	Create a new experiment workspace directory: initialize git, write an AGENTS.md goal doc, and create references/ with index.md + notes/links markdown plus GitHub repos cloned under references/repos (gitignored). Use when the user asks to spin up a scratch/research/experiment folder and provides repos, links, and/or notes to collect.

Experiment Scaffold

Gather inputs

• Experiment directory name (a single path segment; no /)
• Goal (1–3 sentences: what you’re trying to learn/build/test)
• GitHub repos (repeatable; owner/repo or URL)
• Reference URLs (repeatable; blogs/docs/API pages)
• Notes (repeatable; bullets)
• Optional root directory to create the experiment in (default: current directory)

Run the scaffold script

The helper script is scripts/create_experiment.py (next to this SKILL.md). Run it with the extracted inputs.

Example:

python3 scripts/create_experiment.py \
  --root ~/experiments \
  --name vector-search \
  --goal "Evaluate hybrid search with embeddings vs BM25." \
  --repo openai/openai-python \
  --repo facebookresearch/faiss \
  --url https://platform.openai.com/docs/ \
  --note "Measure latency/recall across configs"

What it creates

• <root>/<name>/.gitignore (ignores references/repos/)
• <root>/<name>/AGENTS.md (goal + pointer to references/index.md)
• <root>/<name>/references/index.md (inventory + clone status)
• <root>/<name>/references/notes.md
• <root>/<name>/references/links.md
• <root>/<name>/references/repos/<owner>/<repo> (cloned; gitignored)

Cloning notes (gh, multiple accounts, SSH)

• The script tries gh repo clone first and prefers SSH; it falls back if SSH/auth fails.
• If a repo fails to clone and you have multiple GitHub accounts, check gh auth status and switch with gh auth switch -u <user>.
• To default gh to SSH cloning, set gh config set git_protocol ssh.

Useful flags

• --depth 0 for a full clone (default is shallow)
• --no-clone to generate structure without cloning
• --strict to stop on the first clone failure (otherwise record failures in references/index.md)