Materials

Cheat sheets and curated links for the semester project. Everything here is yours to copy into your own repo — and see templates/ for working versions of the config pattern, cleaning/analysis file skeletons, and the AGENTS.md house-rules file the lecture refers to.

In this folder

File When to use it
Research decisions log Every assignment. Log each cleaning/construction choice — and let the agent draft the entries: it made the changes, it writes them up, you review and correct. Documentation gets cheaper with an agent, not more burdensome.
Git in VS Code Finding your way around the Source Control panel — badges, diffs, commits, and the discard button.
Git cheat sheet Keep open until the commands are muscle memory (or skip the memorizing — see below).
Good commit messages When your history starts reading “stuff”, “more stuff”, “final”.
econ_gitignore_template Copy into your repo as .gitignore — keeps data files and log clutter out of Git.

Three ways to drive Git, pick whichever sticks:

  1. VS Code’s Source Control panel — the guide above; everything is a button
  2. GitHub Desktop — a friendly standalone app, nothing to memorize
  3. Ask the agent — “commit this with a sensible message” works; you’ll still want to read what it committed

Concepts

Short, economics-native reads from Thinking with Agents:

LSMS

  • LSMS survey catalog — microdata downloads
  • LSMS program page — documentation and guidebooks
  • LSMS team on GitHub — survey tooling and the harmonized LSMS-ISA agricultural dataset
  • Working in R? The nadaverse and WBqueryR packages talk to the Microdata Library’s catalog API — good for searching studies and pulling codebooks and file lists programmatically (a nice agent task). The data files themselves you download yourself, through your account (access is requested per survey).

Good research code

Tools

More

  • Thinking with Agents — resources page — a living, annotated list of apps, academic tools, policies, and privacy notes; maintained beyond this course, so link there rather than here for anything current