A background agent that auto-structures messy scientist Excel data, day 17 of agent series
nlarusstone · x · 2026-11-05
Day 17 of the author's 'An agent a day keeps Phase 2 failures away' series: a data-structuring agent. In practice, scientists drop Excel files or PDFs into lab notebooks as 'records', leaving data messy and unusable for downstream analytics/ML. The author shares a ready-to-tweak prompt: have the agent scan the past day's notebook entries, find attachments whose data isn't in a structured table, and auto-add a filled structured table — cleaning data silently in the background.
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