Agentic Kaggle Skill

---
name: agentic-kaggle-skill
description: Kaggle-first end-to-end competition workflow for scored submissions. Use when Codex must run Kaggle or competitive ML workflows through scored submission, including code competitions, validation, metrics, policy-safe public notebook/discussion intel, tabular/text/image modeling, tuning, ensembling/stacking, proactive multi-notebook architectures, producer notebooks that train models and export private Kaggle artifact datasets, downstream consumer notebooks, Kaggle GPU offload, kagglehub access, hidden-test debugging, and public score retrieval.
---

# Agentic Kaggle Skill

## Operating Loop

Treat every competition as a validation problem first and a modeling problem second. The default target platform is Kaggle, so prefer Kaggle-native notebooks/scripts, datasets, model artifacts, competition submissions, and score receipts. For code competitions, assume the final notebook/kernel will be rerun by Kaggle against hidden data unless the competition docs prove otherwise.

1. Read the competition page, classify the submission mode as classic file submission or code/notebook scoring, then inspect the rules, data-use terms, sharing policy, data dictionary, metric, submission format, train/test construction hints, and leakage warnings.
2. If live competition intelligence tools are available, inspect top public open notebook solutions and relevant discussion activity before major architecture choices; treat them as clues, not authority.
3. Identify the task type: binary, multiclass, multilabel, regression, ranking, image, segmentation, text, time series, grouped entities, or a hybrid.
4. Design folds before feature engineering or modeling. Prefer a fold column saved into the training data so every experiment uses the same comparison surface.
5. Build the simplest metric-correct baseline and produce out-of-fold (OOF) predictions plus a valid submission.
6. Proactively plan a stronger architecture once the baseline is trustworthy: diverse model families, feature/embedding producers, augmentation/pseudo-label/distillation stages, calibration/postprocessing, and an ensemble or stacker.
7. Iterate with validation gates: test one meaningful change at a time when possible, but launch several independent producer notebooks in parallel when they create diverse artifacts that can be compared by OOF score or ensemble diversity.
8. Offload heavy training, inference, embedding generation, image/text experiments, or memory-risky jobs to Kaggle notebooks/scripts when local compute may OOM or take too long. Before GPU scheduling or availability claims, fetch fresh quota and apply the GPU quota accounting rule below.
9. For sophisticated architectures, split work into a small Kaggle pipeline: run several independent producer notebooks/scripts first, save each useful producer output as a private Kaggle dataset, then run one consumer notebook/script that attaches those datasets and creates the final OOF/test/submission outputs. When a producer trains a model, its checkpoint, tokenizer/config, fold metadata, OOF/test predictions, and manifest should be exported as a Kaggle dataset; downstream notebooks load the model from `/kaggle/input/...`.
10. Submit the final submission-producing artifact to Kaggle for scoring and retrieve the resulting submission status/score.
11. If Kaggle returns a code-competition error or vague scoring failure, enter the debugging loop: retrieve available logs, classify likely failure mode, patch defensively, rerun the final kernel, resubmit, and repeat until scored or concretely blocked.
12. Track local CV, remote Kaggle run status, Kaggle submission score, public LB, private-risk notes, seed, code version, data version, and artifact paths for every run.
13. Ensemble only with OOF predictions generated without in-fold leakage.

## Resource Map

- Read `references/method-map.md` for the neutral workflow map behind the skill.
- Read `references/information-sharing-policy.md` before publishing competition code, notebooks, datasets, models, artifacts, or reports outside the active team or workspace.
- Read `references/competition-intel.md` when a Kaggle competition slug, URL, title, public leaderboard context, open solutions, or discussion activity may inform the approach.
- Read `references/cross-validation-and-metrics.md` when choosing folds, metrics, thresholds, or leakage checks.
- Read `references/tabular-workflow.md` for categorical variables, feature engineering, selection, and hyperparameter tuning.
- Read `references/image-text-workflow.md` for image, segmentation, and NLP competition approaches.
- Read `references/kaggle-code-competition-pipeline.md` when the target is a Kaggle code competition, hidden rerun, final notebook scoring flow, or model artifact handoff between producer and consumer notebooks.
- Read `references/advanced-notebook-architecture.md` when a stronger solution may need multiple model families, staged feature/embedding/model producers, pseudo-labeling, distillation, postprocessing, blending, stacking, or parallel Kaggle GPU notebooks.
- Read `references/kaggle-offload.md` when local runs are heavy, GPU is useful, Kaggle data access is needed, or remote notebook results must be collected.
- Read `references/kaggle-pipeline-datasets.md` when using multiple Kaggle notebooks, intermediate datasets, notebook output sources, or `kagglehub`.
- Read `references/submission-endgame.md` before stopping work; this skill is not done until Kaggle scoring has been attempted and the result has been collected or a concrete blocker is documented.
- Read `references/code-competition-debugging.md` when a Kaggle code competition submission fails, times out, OOMs, produces no score, or reports a vague hidden-run/scoring error.
- Read `references/ensembling-and-reproducibility.md` for project layout, OOF artifacts, stacking, blending, and repeatability.
- Read `references/research/` or `examples/` only when the user asks for historical case studies, Hermes-era patterns, or concrete competition lessons from this repository.
- Run `scripts/scaffold_competition.py` to create a competition workspace.
- Run `scripts/make_folds.py` to add a fold column to a training CSV.
- Run `scripts/prepare_kaggle_kernel.py` to create a Kaggle kernel folder with metadata and retrievable experiment logs.
- Run `scripts/prepare_kaggle_dataset.py` to create metadata and commands for versioned intermediate artifact datasets.