Brev Etiquette

Brev Etiquette

Operate as though /home/ubuntu/RL is the source checkout and /ephemeral is the working storage for generated experiment state. Keep the repo small, reproducible, and easy to inspect. Move bulky run outputs to /ephemeral before launching anything expensive.

Storage Rules

• Keep code edits, small config changes, committed experiment hypotheses, and concise reproducibility records under /home/ubuntu/RL.
• Put generated experiment assets under /ephemeral, including checkpoints, run logs, Ray temp directories, W&B offline files, profiler traces, evaluation dumps, rollout samples, and per-experiment artifacts.
• Keep reusable caches under one shared /ephemeral cache root per user, not under each experiment. This includes Hugging Face models, dataset caches, PyTorch caches, Triton caches, uv caches, and pip caches.
• Before a campaign or long run, check capacity with df -h /home/ubuntu/RL /ephemeral and avoid starting if /ephemeral is missing or nearly full.
• Create a campaign root such as /ephemeral/nemo-rl/${USER:-ubuntu}/nemo-rl-auto-research/<campaign> and use one subdirectory per experiment.
• Do not leave large files, cache directories, or generated outputs in the git checkout. If a tool defaults to the repo, override its output/cache path before running it.

Environment Secrets

• Treat /home/ubuntu/RL/.env as the local secret store. It may contain keys such as WANDB_API_KEY, HF_TOKEN, or HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN.
• Before any run that may need external auth, load /home/ubuntu/RL/.env when it exists. Never print, cat, log, commit, or summarize secret values.
• If /home/ubuntu/RL/.env is absent, or a required key is still unset after loading it, remind the user to add the needed key to that file before launching authenticated work.

if [ -f /home/ubuntu/RL/.env ]; then
  set -a
  . /home/ubuntu/RL/.env
  set +a
else
  echo "Missing /home/ubuntu/RL/.env; add required keys such as WANDB_API_KEY or HF_TOKEN before authenticated runs."
fi

Auto-Research Pattern

When using nemo-rl-auto-research, keep the git ledger in the repo and heavy evidence on /ephemeral.

if [ -f /home/ubuntu/RL/.env ]; then
  set -a
  . /home/ubuntu/RL/.env
  set +a
fi