vast-experiment-opslisted
Install: claude install-skill Lu1sDV/skillsmd
# vast-experiment-ops
Error-informed operational playbook for renting, running, and reporting ML
experiments on Vast.ai. It supplements the platform docs and the instance's own
guide; it replaces neither.
## Quick reference
| Situation | Action |
|---|---|
| Strict FP32 equivalence passes on CPU, fails on CUDA | Re-run the unchanged check in a fresh process with `NVIDIA_TF32_OVERRIDE=0` set before Python starts |
| `JSONDecodeError` parsing remote metrics | Capture stdout/stderr separately, parse stdout only; collector emits exactly one JSON document on stdout |
| Asked whether the test split was used | Answer from this run's queue config and result metadata plus prior artifacts — never open test data to answer |
| Reporting progress | Include UTC time, snapshot age, active trial/epoch, and complete/pruned/failed/running counts |
| Sizing a job | Check cgroup CPU/RAM limits, free GPU memory, free disk, and storage persistence — host totals mislead |
## Ground rules
- Get the instance address and experiment paths from the user or project
config. Never reuse an address remembered from this skill.
- Read the instance's own guide (e.g. `/etc/vast-agents-guide.md`) before
operating on it; use its Python environment and service manager.
- Treat a status request as read-only: do not restart services, change
numerical settings, or read held-out data just to report progress.
## Case 1 — CPU passes, CUDA fails strict recurrent equivalence
**Observed:** step-versus-full-rep