lab-notebook

Lab Notebook

Optimize For Re-entry And Auditability

• A notebook should answer both:
  • what exactly happened?
  • what do we currently believe?
• Prefer one low-friction chronological record plus a sparse current-summary layer.
• Reuse the project's existing notebook pattern instead of inventing a new structure.

Choose The Notebook Shape

• If the project already uses one file with summary plus chronology, keep that shape.
• If the project already uses a detailed campaign notebook plus a sparse top-level lab notebook, keep that split.
• Do not create two equally detailed notebooks.
• Default rule:
  • detailed layer: append literal work record
  • summary layer: update only when the decision or current understanding changes

Use This Entry Contract

For each meaningful experiment, debugging step, or job intervention, capture:

1. Question or goal.
2. Action taken.
3. Evidence:
   • commands, scripts, configs, paths, job IDs, artifacts, metrics.
4. Result:
   • what actually happened.
5. Conclusion:
   • the inference you are drawing, if any.
6. Inference confidence:
   • low, medium, or high when the entry is making a real inference.
7. Decision impact:
   • what changed in current understanding, or what the next step is.

Update The Summary Sparingly

• Update the summary layer only when one of these changes:
  • current best explanation
  • current best branch or baseline
  • settled negative results
  • next discriminative check
  • success criterion or decision rule
• Do not rewrite the summary after every routine action.
• The summary should be short enough that a fresh agent can re-enter from it.
• If multiple live explanations matter, keep a tiny hypothesis registry in the summary layer:
  • hypothesis
  • strongest support
  • strongest weakening evidence
  • next falsifier

Make Entries Useful

• Include exact evidence paths and identifiers.
• Include representative visual artifact paths when a plot, overlay, slice, curve, or diff view materially affected the decision.
• Record negative results explicitly when they rule out a family of ideas.
• If the entry draws an inference, state it explicitly instead of leaving it implicit in the next step.
• Keep inference confidence coarse: low, medium, or high.
• Do not add confidence to entries that are only reporting raw observations or routine actions.
• Preserve chronology so later readers can reconstruct what happened.
• End each entry with "so what?" in concrete form.
• If nothing changed in understanding, say that explicitly.