Notebook Contracts for Messy Experiments

Exploratory prompting dies in notebooks when cells become anonymous scratchpads. We ask learners to treat each prompt cell like a tiny API: name, intent, inputs, and a frozen seed reference—even if the seed is “none by design.” The contract also includes an export cell that renders markdown for mentors. Mentors should not have to execute thirty cells to understand what happened. We saw the best adoption when teams paired the contract with a Friday cleanup drill: delete dead branches, pin working prompts, and snapshot outputs. It is manual hygiene, but it beats losing a week of work to a bad merge. Limitation: this pattern assumes teammates read markdown. If your culture ignores docs, fix that first—prompt contracts cannot carry the whole communication load.