This edition of @sara-altman.bsky.social and I's AI Newsletter is a @posit.co heavy one! Support for new model providers in Positron Assistant, an experimental coding agent for RStudio, a conference on #rstats + AI this week, and more. :) posit.co/blog/2025-11...

🗞️ New edition of the Posit AI Newsletter is up on the Posit blog! Curated by @sara-altman.bsky.social and @simonpcouch.com, this week covers LLM introspection, an RStudio coding agent, custom providers in Positron Assistant, and more. Read the latest: posit.co/blog/2025-11...

side::kick() is model-agnostic. When you first launch the app, a setup flow will detect whether any common providers are already configured to help you get started. #rstats

pkgdown 2.2.0 now out — tidyverse.org/blog/2025/11.... Main feature is new build_llm_docs() which makes your websites easier to understand by LLMs. (Which you can easily turn off if desired) #rstats

I'm excited to share side::kick(), an experimental open-source coding agent for RStudio built entirely in R. It can interact with your files, communicate with your active #rstats session, and run code. Check it out: github.com/simonpcouch/...

Tomorrow morning! Come by!

Happy Halloween to all who celebrate. Hope you and/or your kids get some nice candy and fun times tonight! Here's a silly little post on making neon ghosts in #rstats with #ggplot2 drmowinckels.io/blog/2025/ne...

mcptools 0.2.0 is on CRAN! mcptools implements the Model Context Protocol in #rstats, allowing ellmer users to share context and tools more easily between LLM applications. Read more: github.com/posit-dev/mc...

I'll be keynoting at R/Pharma a week from today! The conference is free and virtual. I'll be focused on the mundane use cases of LLMs for wrangling data with #rstats, and the content should feel applicable for folks outside of pharma—come through. :) Register: events.zoom.us/ev/Ai-geyS63...

Thank you so much, Jen! If all goes well, that submission will be the final #TidyTuesday for 2025! It is *so* helpful when people submit datasets! I've been able to implement features to catch errors in datasets, and I have more on the way. Maybe I'll even finally finish the easier to use website!

I sincerely apologize for the mcptools package not having a cute lil feller on its hex sticker in its first release. This will be corrected in the next #rstats CRAN release!!! posit-dev.github.io/mcptools/

The newest release of @sara-altman.bsky.social and I's AI Newsletter covers support for GitHub Copilot as a chat provider in Positron Assistant, two releases from Anthropic, and reflections on water and electricity usage of data centers. Read it on the @posit.co blog: posit.co/blog/2025-10...

GitHub Copilot powering Positron Assistant Chat mode is huge for my job! We have Posit Connect and our only LLM is GitHub Copilot. The only way to get copilot to edit and run code directly on the posit connect server was to remote-ssh from VSCode. All I need to do convince IT to enable positron.

🗞️ New edition of the Posit AI Newsletter is up on the Posit blog! Curated by @sara-altman.bsky.social and @simonpcouch.com, the newsletter keeps you up to date: Claude Haiku 4.5 GitHub Copilot support in Positron Assistant AI water and energy use 📬 Read the newsletter: posit.co/blog/2025-10...

We are extremely excited about this! @lionelhenry.bsky.social did an awesome job shepherding this feature, and we think that both decimal alignment and using commas as "column guides" for your `tribble()` calls makes QC-ing your code easier and less error prone!

I'll be keynoting at R/Pharma in a few weeks! The conference is free and virtual; all are welcome to join. My talk "Practical AI for data science" is on November 5th and should be broadly accessible for #rstats users, regardless of industry. :) Learn more & register: rinpharma.com

Claude Code tip: prompt "use sub-agents" and it will do exactly that, firing up multiple parallel sub-agents to achieve a task, each with a fresh context "Write markdown documentation for the context passed to each of the templates in this project. Use sub-agents." simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/11/...

🚀 The 4th edition of the Posit AI Newsletter is out! This biweekly, bite-sized update by @sara-altman.bsky.social and @simonpcouch.com covers Claude Sonnet 4.5, OpenAI investments, situational awareness, and more. Read the full issue here: posit.co/blog/2025-10...

ICYMI, @sara-altman.bsky.social and I have been writing a biweekly newsletter on AI and open source data science on the @posit.co blog! A bit about how that came to be on my #rstats blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2025-10...

🤩 My code produced when using LLMs to work on #rstats code got waaaaay better after I read this blog post by @simonpcouch.com on his Claude setup! www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2025-07...

Just dropped a WHOLE BUNCH of these somewhere👀👀👀 #positconf2025

Just wrapped up a talk at #positconf2025 about LLM evaluation with R! Such a joy to hang out with #rstats folks in person and hear about what others are working on. Resources and slides: github.com/simonpcouch/...

The always delightful @k-bott.bsky.social shares the educational principles of Posit Academy for teaching professionals in the wild: Practice that is: 💫 Repeated over time, 💕 relevant to their domain, 🪜 within their reach, and 👯‍♂️ conducted in a community. #positconf2025

I absolutely *love* that @simonpcouch.com mentioned using Google Sheets to easily supply input(s) and target(s) for evaluating #LLM quality {vitals} 🧸 Sometimes selecting right-sized solutions means deviating the "serious" data science techniques to get things done, creatively! #positconf25

@sara-altman.bsky.social and I just shared the second release of the Posit AI Newsletter! In this edition, a landmark settlement on LLM training data and copyright, the emergence of agentic browsers, and more. Read and subscribe on the Posit Blog: posit.co/blog/2025-09...

I hope no one is tired of seeing adorable #pawsitconf posts full of cute pets and punny talk titles, because @trevinflickinger.com helped his THREE dogs submit talks 😭 JUST LOOK AT THEM #rstats #python #databs #positconf2025

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

People keep telling me they can't afford to attend #PositConf2025 next week, so I need to make a public service announcement: attending virtually is very affordable (or free!) & is amazing! Get registered & hangout with me on the Discord server!! #databs #rstats #python

I kinda feel like the president declaring war on an American city should be an uncrossable line, but I don't know what to do at this point. www.cnn.com/2025/09/06/p...

There's been a big push at Posit this summer to get high-quality OpenTelemetry support out to the #rstats community (a longstanding dream of mine). I think {mirai} is the first package release to showcase this work, and as per usual with @shikokuchuo.net, it was done in record time!

somehow I just learned there's a variety of blackberries called obsidian, and of course it makes the best jam stephango.com/quality-software

🚀 We’re excited to share the first edition of the Posit AI Newsletter! Curated by Posit’s Sara Altman and Simon Couch, this biweekly newsletter keeps you up to speed with what’s happening in the AI world, both at Posit and beyond. 📫 Read the first issue: posit.co/blog/2025-08...

Using the crap out of this extension as I work on my #positconf2025 slides and loooving it. Something tells me we'll be seeing some masterfully-placed images in #quarto slides at conf this year. :)

Two weeks to go 😬 I'll be presenting on the fun work I've been doing on spreadsheets + R #rstats #positconf

Sign-up for the next round of the rainbowR buddies scheme is open! Buddies will be paired/introduced on Sept 2nd 🌈👯‍♂️ If you're LGBTQ+ and code in #RStats, and want an opportunity to connect with someone else in the community (through a random pairing), then this is for you 😃 rainbowr.org/buddies

So stoked to share about the first release of the Posit AI Newsletter! @sara-altman.bsky.social and I have been working on a pilot of this newsletter internally for a few months now—an opinionated and pragmatic snapshot of AI news released every two weeks. First edition: posit.co/blog/2025-08...

odbc 1.6.2 is now on #rstats CRAN! A good few QOL improvements, especially for Databricks and Snowflake users: github.com/r-dbi/odbc/r...

Slides from my #rstats talk “Measuring LLM Effectiveness” at #dataconfAI with @simonpcouch.com. topepo.github.io/2025_NYR/ Video in about a month. Great conference!

In working on an eval for an experimental tidymodels AI assistant, I realized that today's frontier LLMs know much more about #rstats tidymodels than I thought. www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2025-08...

Does Jenny Bryan #VibeCode? 🤔 She shared on the Hangout that she's been thankful that she gets to learn #rust and #typscript in the age of #AI and these are her thoughts on #LLM use. (We really need a #RubberDuck emoji 🦆) #rstats #databs #VibeCoding #DSHangout #python

I was loving Claude Code... until I tried it with #rstats. Constant errors, wouldn't use the tidyverse even when asked, "optimized" functions were slower. Frustrated, I started a session just to teach R to Claude and summarize what it learned into a CLAUDE.md file gist.github.com/sj-io/3828d6...

We still have spots available for tidyverse dev day on Sept 19: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/07.... Please come along to contribute to the tidyverse and have a bunch of fun along the way! It's open to all, but is most convenient if you're coming to posit::conf or live near Atlanta #rstats

Such a cool post. At one point, Isabella writes about serving an LLM with ollama on a spare computer and connecting to it over the local network with ellmer!

Really, really excited to get to the next stage with Positron, including upcoming general availability of Positron in Posit Workbench! posit.co/blog/positro... #RStats #PyData #dataBS #datascience #positron

Oh hell yeah

some light teasing for an upcoming quarto revealjs plugin I have been working on

{hexsession} by @liomys.mx is fun and useful! Produces css/html snippets that tile hex logos nicely, e.g. to showcase your #rstats package projects. 😎 github.com/luisDVA/hexs... #useR2025

Excited for @davisvaughan.bsky.social & my talk tomorrow in which we will demo a shiny app we ✨ vibe coded ✨ up today, if you're at #user2025 stop by Gross at 10:30a tomorrow. Sneak peak 👇

#useR2025, sticker and some cool attendees 😁🤭

Welp, {chores} by @simonpcouch.com is an immediate install for sure. Basically it's {usethis} plus llm bundled into RStudio/Positron key encoding. Excited!!! 🧹🧺 #useR2025 #rstats #couchverse?