demolab-cli 2.0.1

Lab notebook for computational science: Python tools produce per-run artifacts; Typst publishes them as a web bundle, per-entry PDFs, and a book.

Demolab

A lab notebook for computational science — reproducible results, published and citable, run by a coding agent instead of a build system.

Coding agent setting someone up? Run uvx demolab-cli docs GETTING-STARTED, read the file it prints, and follow it strictly, step by step. (Human, setting up by hand? See Quickstart.)

You write a model or experiment once as a small program. Demolab runs it, captures everything it produced, stamps it with the exact code version, and publishes a clean page — figures, numbers, and real typeset maths — to both the web and PDF. The numbers on the page are read from the run, so they can't drift. You drive it all by talking to a coding agent; there's no web development or build config to touch.

Quickstart

Open your coding agent in an empty folder and paste:

Run uvx demolab-cli init here, then follow its GETTING-STARTED runbook strictly.

It lays your lab down, walks you through the toolchain (uv, typst) and your first experiment, one step at a time.

Set it up by hand instead?

Install uv and typst (brew install uv typst), then:

mkdir my-lab && cd my-lab
uvx demolab-cli init   # lab structure + git init — yours from the first commit
uv sync                # installs the deps and the `demolab` command

Then write your first experiment — ask your agent to follow GETTING-STARTED, or model one on a shipped reference (demolab docs STARTERS prints the dir; monte-carlo-pi is the canonical starter). demolab dev serves the site as you go. The engine lives in the demolab-cli package — updating it is uv lock --upgrade-package demolab-cli && uv sync.

What to ask your agent

Open your lab in your agent and say a runbook's name — it follows that runbook one step at a time. demolab docs lists them all (each is a plain file shipped in the package; demolab docs <NAME> prints its path). In this repo they live under demolab_cli/runbooks/.

Say…	…and it will
GETTING-STARTED	set you up end to end: scaffold, your first experiment live on a page, brand, publish
TOUR	guided walkthrough of the lab — what's here, what it found, where to start
MIGRATE-CODE	bring an existing codebase in, one experiment at a time
FROM-JUPYTER	launder a Jupyter notebook into a reproducible, seeded experiment
FROM-PAPER	scaffold experiments to reproduce a paper's key result in your stack
MIGRATE-STACK	write your tools in MATLAB / Julia / R / Octave instead of Python
EMBED-DOCS	drop demolab into another project as a docs/ site
NEXT	read your whole arc and propose the next experiments worth running
GROUND-CLAIMS	find the source sentences behind each citation
LINT	check your writeups against the house style
DOCTOR	audit the repo against the conventions
RED-TEAM	adversarially check a result holds up before you publish it
STEELMAN	build the strongest honest case for a result, so you don't under-sell it
UPDATE	update the engine package, leaving your content untouched

How it works

One decoupled loop: a tool computes → drops data → an experiment writes it up → the site publishes it. Every run records its exact parameters and the git commit it came from (stamped on the page), and tables read their numbers straight from the run — so prose and results can't disagree. A single Typst pass emits a website, a PDF per entry, and a book, all sharing the same live numbers.

The detail lives in the guides (in a lab: demolab docs <NAME>; in this repo, the files under demolab_cli/guides/):

• RULES.md — the tool ↔ experiment contract, schemas, provenance, and how to add things.
• STRUCTURE.md — the annotated file tree.
• HOUSESTYLE.md — prose, maths, and figure style.
• AGENTS.md — the agent entry point.

Commands

demolab shows them all. The everyday ones: init, docs, install, scaffold, dev, build, test. Run an experiment end-to-end directly: uv run python experiments/expNNN.py (there's no demolab run wrapper).

License

MIT — free to use, fork, and adapt for your own lab.