← LeaderboardThe Skill Leaderboard

freeze-check

Checks whether registered notebooks have current, stale, or missing outputs. Use before rendering or to verify freshness.

Published by brycewang-stanford ↗brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills

Try your first task

freeze-check

Start a fresh conversation.

Use freeze-check to check the execution freshness of every notebook registered in `_quarto.yml` and provide a status table identifying any stale, unexecuted, missing, or freeze-only notebooks.

    User-approved starter prompt based on a pinned source version; check current skill requirements before running. Task evidence ↗

    SKILL.md

    name: freeze-checkdescription: Checks whether registered notebooks have current, stale, or missing outputs. Use before rendering or to verify freshness.allowed-tools: Bash, Read, Glob, Grep

    Check Notebook Execution Freshness

    Verify that all registered notebooks have been executed and their outputs are current.

    Steps

    1. Read _quarto.yml and extract all notebook paths from manuscript.notebooks.

    2. For each registered notebook, check:

      • Has outputs: Open the .ipynb JSON and check if any code cells have non-empty outputs arrays
      • Last modified: File modification timestamp of the .ipynb
      • Outputs age: Check execution metadata timestamps in cell metadata (if present) to determine when outputs were last generated
      • Freeze cache: Check if _freeze/notebooks/<name>/ directory exists and contains cached output
    3. Determine freshness status for each notebook:

      • Current: has outputs and the .ipynb has not been modified since outputs were generated
      • Stale: has outputs but the .ipynb source cells have been modified more recently than the outputs
      • Unexecuted: no outputs in any code cell
      • Freeze only: no cell outputs but a _freeze/ cache exists (Quarto will use the cache)
    4. Report a summary table:

      Notebook              Has Outputs   Last Modified        Status
      ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
      notebook-01.ipynb     Yes           2026-02-28 14:30     Current
      notebook-02.ipynb     Yes           2026-03-01 09:15     Stale
      notebook-03.ipynb     No            2026-02-25 11:00     Unexecuted
      
    5. If any notebooks are stale or unexecuted, flag them and offer to run /project:execute to re-execute all notebooks.

    6. If all notebooks are current, report "All notebooks are up to date."

    Error handling

    • If _quarto.yml has no notebooks registered, report "No notebooks found in _quarto.yml" and stop.
    • If a registered notebook file does not exist on disk, flag it as missing.