A new release of chores is now on #rstats CRAN!

There are now some LLMs tiny enough to run on a laptop that are capable of powering chores helpers. Here's a real-time demo with a model running on my Macbook.

Read more: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2025-12...

A new release of vitals, a package for LLM evaluation in #rstats, is now on CRAN!🎄 This release includes all sorts of quality-of-life improvements; image support, precise latency measurement, better error messages, and more comprehensive logging.

github.com/tidyverse/vi...

Do you use Positron?😉

Gemini 3 is out! I've been poking at it with `side::kick()` and am impressed so far.

In case you want to connect to it with the #rstats ellmer package, I wrote some quick notes in a Gist: gist.github.com/simonpcouch/...

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

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/...

I've been getting a lot more out of Claude Code after hooking it up to tools that let it read #rstats pkg docs. I just type "read about some::topic" before tasking Claude with things that are unlikely to be in its training data, and the model will pull up whatever help files it needs.

Introducing acquaint, an R package that turns your R sessions into a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. This allows MCP-enabled tools like Claude Desktop and Claude Code to run #rstats code _in your active R sessions_ to explore objects, read documentation, etc.

posit-dev.github.io/acquaint/