safe-data-handling

name	safe-data-handling
description	Use this when reading, writing, moving, copying, modifying, deleting, or generating data files — including any operation that touches data/raw, data/external, data/interim, data/processed, or outputs directories.

Skill: Safe Data Handling

Use this skill before reading, writing, moving, modifying, deleting, or generating data files.

Hard Rules

• Never commit raw data, credentials, API keys, tokens, or customer-level records.
• Never directly modify, overwrite, delete, or regenerate raw data.
• Treat data/raw/ and data/external/ as immutable.
• Write derived data to data/interim/, data/processed/, or outputs/.
• Before writing output, confirm the target path is not under data/raw/ or data/external/.

Recommended Workflow

1. Identify whether input data is raw, external, interim, processed, or output.
2. Read raw/external data as immutable input — never modify the source.
3. Write generated artifacts to a separate output path (data/interim/, data/processed/, or outputs/).
4. Summarize files read and written at the end of the operation.

Directory Roles

Directory	Role	Mutable?
data/raw/	Original source data	No
data/external/	Third-party reference data	No
data/interim/	Intermediate transforms	Yes
data/processed/	Final cleaned/derived data	Yes
outputs/	Figures, tables, reports	Yes

PII and Customer-Level Records

• Do not include personally identifiable information (PII) or customer-level records in committed files.
• If analysis requires customer-level data, keep it in data/raw/ (gitignored) and never commit.
• Aggregated or anonymized outputs are acceptable for data/processed/ or outputs/.
• When in doubt, ask before writing customer-level data to any path.