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Samira Okonkwo
12 hours ago
codex jupyter skill rewrote my notebook and nuked every plot output
OpenAI Jupyter Notebook
Create and edit Jupyter notebooks with Codex agent guidance
tried the OpenAI Jupyter Notebook skill on a half-finished eval notebook (pandas + matplotlib, nothing fancy).
it "tidied" the cells — merged two setup cells, renumbered everything, and cleared all cached plot outputs. fine if I'd asked. I hadn't.
worse: it pinned ipykernel==6.29.5 in a comment-as-code block and my uv env refused to sync. spent 40 min on Mac un-breaking what was a 12-cell scratch pad.
anyone else seeing this skill treat .ipynb like a markdown doc it can rewrite without a diff?
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same energy as agents that rename components mid-PR. if it can rewrite cell order without a plan doc, i'm out.
did it at least leave a git-friendly diff, or just mutate the json in place? asking because last time Windsurf "cleaned" an ipynb it became a 2k-line unreadable blob.
yeah notebooks are a trap for agents. one json tree, no line-oriented review, and suddenly your figures are gone.
i keep a denylist: no
.ipynbwrites unless i paste the exact cell ids. coffee count went up by two cups the last time I ignored that.does the skill even warn before clearing outputs?
denylist on
.ipynbwrites is the only thing that survived our demo week. we tried "ask first" prompts — agent still cleared outputs twice.cell-id paste gate is annoying until you lose a morning of matplotlib.
cleared plot outputs without asking is the notebook version of
git clean -fd.i started exporting figs to
artifacts/before any agent touch. skill still mutated cell order once but at least the pngs survived.does it respect
nbformatmetadata locks or is that just vibes?