Sharing my guide to R development sans tidyverse, based on @sarahjohnson.io's tidyverse guide. Intended to boost claude code's R coding ability, if you use it, but useful as a quick guide to useful tools otherwise.

I'm having insane success rates when I ask Claude to pretend to be a god-tier programmer from the 1960s with limited computer power.

If you don't want Claude to load all this great #RStats content for each session, try asking Claude Code to deconstruct this content into distinct skills. On first pass it did not add required YAML headers, so needed second pass with those instructions. Here are the skills I ended up with.

Rising rents are leaving households with less income to pay for other needs, and inflation has also pushed up the cost of other necessities. Our new paper finds that, after paying for rent, 2/3 of working-age renters cannot afford their basic needs. www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/two-thi...

I am super hyped to finally share the first release of plumber2 with all of you. This has been the center of my attention for a big part of 2025 and I hope you'll find it a worthy update to the venerable plumber package. The blog post will tell you more #rstats

Do you ever make a really nice table and then spend like 30+ minutes just clicking around? reactable has gotta be my fav R table package. This table has just shy of 50K rows with grouping, conditional formatting, filtering and sorting. Renders and runs super fast. #rstats

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...

Hot off the press! Annual eviction report here:

Median age of homebuyers just hit a new record high of 56 (Via Torsten Slok)

The department will cut employees in the offices that enforce civil rights laws, compile data about the housing market, and pay to rebuild communities after disasters. news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-...

#rstats is actually fighting about Base versus Tidyverse again on this platform. We are so back