This is fantastic news! Heather is such a positive force in the #rstats community and is doing vital work for the long-term sustainability of R and its community.
I really enjoyed reading this article from scikit-learn maintainers about the specific impacts of AI-generated open source contributions, recommendations for maintainers, and the potential for positives where AI use can be helpful.
blog.probabl.ai/maintaining-...
#ai #opensource #llms
Ah, cheers!
OMG, same, like the AI shame is so real, even when it's inevitable we're going to make mistakes with something so new!
That's so cool! What does the extension do?
Thanks! I still am impressed by how easy it makes it to do these kinds of things!
I built a GitHub issue classifier for Apache Arrow issue language using {ellmer} - super simple and almost 100% accuracy. Blog post: niccrane.com/posts/llm-issue-triage/
#rstats #ai #llms
In the shower thinking "wouldn't it be cool to combine LLM tool calls and have them run code but in a constrained way" & then "it needs some kind of intermediate representation; how would we validate whatever it produces?" & then realised my idea wasn't novel & just the motivation for text-to-sql 😅
I remember at posit::conf last year there was mention of posit::conf Europe 2026 - anyone know if this is still a thing? #rstats #positconf #posit
Huge thanks to the organisational team for putting on such an excellent event! 💜🌈
Excited for all of the talks tomorrow, check out the schedule here if you havent' seen it! conference.rainbowr.org/schedule.html
Whew, and it's done! Thanks to everyone who came to my RainbowR workshop on LLMs for Data Analysis in #rstats! First time with that content in front of an audience, so I appreciate the excellent questions folks asked (and double thanks to everyone who filled in the feedback forms!)
"Working with agents is a lot more productive, but a lot less fun." Charlie Marsh on the weird world of building software right now. Full conversation on The Test Set.
Sounds interesting, how well does it work for R code?
It's still experimental, so potentially some rough edges, but I think it's a great example of making sure the LLM benefits are tempered with what actually makes sense for *people*.
Instead of generating a load of comment, you get suggestions one at a time, which you can then choose to accept or reject, before it moves on to the next suggestion. It generates suggestions as it goes, so if you accept some changes but reject others, its suggestions change on the basis of the code.
There's promise in using LLMs for code review, but it's tricky things to make sure it's not overwhelming.
I was looking at this new experimental package by Simon Couch and I really love how it allows you to review code iteratively. #rstats #ai #llms
github.com/simonpcouch/...
Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...
Should be there shortly!
Let's talk contributors! This release saw 44 contributors to the codebase! 38 worked on the C++ library, 3 on the R 📦, & 3 on both. 23 people made their first contribution! 🎉
Thanks to everyone who was involved!
Writing partitioned datasets on S3 no longer requires ListBucket permissions; useful if you have write-only access to a bucket.
We've added support for stringr::str_ilike() for case-insensitive pattern matching.
We're excited to announce the release of {arrow} 23.0.0 🏹📦
Here's a roundup of the new features and changes in a 🧵
Full details can be found at arrow.apache.org/docs/r/news/
#rstats #apachearrow
I mean, you could say the same thing about any R function; just a toy example - feel free to replace it with something more useful! 😉
Yeah, there's some irony in the fact that I randomly chose that specific example, and then the results even showed the new features including the web fetch thing making my example redundant! 😆 I shall have to think up a new example for when I'm teaching, but YAY, awesome new feature! 🎉
Tool calling lets LLMs run R functions; in this example I let an LLM ask my R session to check the latest {ellmer} updates by scraping the news page and when I ask the LLM "what's new in ellmer?", it works with what comes back.
{ellmer} website: ellmer.tidyverse.org
#rstats #llms #ai #datascience
More on LLMs and plot interpretation: they do fine in normal conditions, but struggle when the plot conflicts strongly with their priors.
@simonpcouch.com and I investigated why and what might help: posit.co/blog/llm-plo...
I love "structured output" as a way of extracting data from text as data frame. 🎯
Image shows using the {ellmer} package and how using type_array(type_object(...)) automatically returns a data frame in R 🔧
{ellmer} website: ellmer.tidyverse.org
#rstats #llms #ai #datascience
posit::conf(2026) call for talks is now open! If you're an #RStats or #Python user, have a great DS workflow to share, or have some lessons learned, we'd love to hear from you.
🔗 posit.co/blog/posit-c...
