Hadley Wickham

Claude code is as good at writing R code as me, in the small. (Still isn’t as good in the large)

Can’t bring your own key for _yet_.

So you’re assuming it’s been rendered once

So always?

How does it access the rendered plot?

I am glad that Bluesky has now captured all the best parts of #rstats twitter: dank memes, sick burns, hot takes, and flame wars.

I've got to say no no no #RStats

RStudio now has next edit suggestions! I wrote a bit about how they work and have open-sourced the eval we used to engineer the system's prompt: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-03...

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

But not tibbles!

We are working super hard on it! So hopefully soon

My hope is we can do more cheaper plans once we have more data about how much it costs to run. We want it to be sustainable in the long term which means being financially cautious to start with.

I'm Not a Robot Prove your humanity once and for all

This makes me think of a fun captcha game I played once called I’m not a robot -

neal.fun/not-a-robot/

Screenshot of a plot legend showing two colored lines: a red line and a blue line. The red line is labeled "blue" and the blue line is labeled "red"

Turns out if you put the color argument inside the aesthetic instead of outside by mistake, you can get the most confusing ggplot legend ever #rstats

How to choose the best LLM using R and vitals Use the vitals package with ellmer to evaluate and compare the accuracy of LLMs, including writing evals to test local models.

R folks listening to this morning's #NICAR26 session on extracting data from documents and - importantly! - how to check your results: You can set up and run evaluations of LLM results with the {vitals} #rstats 📦
www.infoworld.com/ar... #DDJ

A digital CAPTCHA verification window titled "Select all squares with PIPES" against a plain white background. The window contains a 3×3 grid of numbered squares, mixing literal hardware, smoking pipes, and programming syntax.

These captchas just keep getting harder #rstats

A screenshot of an RStudio window. On the left-hand side is a new pain called Posit Assistant. The Posit Assistant had recently run code making a lat-lon plot of Washington state, colored by whether the point had been marked as forested or not.

Today we're releasing AI for RStudio. It's really, really good—I'd encourage you to point it at the messiest data sources you have and see what it can do.

www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-03...

I mean technically you can’t load the tidyverse without base R so 🤷‍♂️

I wrote something. I hope it can be the start of more conversations about AI and the choices we all have to make.
erincikanek.com/the-rumors-o...

A Few Claude Skills for R Users – R Works The community has come together to create some great Claude Skills that you can try out today.

I rounded up a few Claude Skills for #RStats users.

Huge thanks to the creators who developed them. They share Skills for everything from tidyverse code to brand.yml files to learning while using AI.

Hope the list is useful, and please let me know what I missed! 🧡

rworks.dev/posts/claude...

A pink and blue graphic reading "apply for our opportunity scholarship to posit::conf(2026)."

We are covering 40 people's travel, lodging, and registration for posit::conf() this fall! If you are from a group that is underrepresented in data science or open source, please consider applying for the Opportunity Scholarship—we'd love to have you join.

posit.co/blog/apply-t...

they're a 10 but they don't like tibbles

A birthday card generated by Google Nano Banana from the prompt: "Can you make a birthday card or an image of a birthday cake for R software? R 1.0.0 was first released on February 29, 2000 [It gets the birthday WRONG.]

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊
🎂Happy #Rstats birthday!

R 1.0.0 was first released on February 29, 2000.
Does that make it 26 or just 6.5 leap-years old?
www.r-consortium.org/blog/2023/02...
[Cake by Nano Banana, but it gets age WRONG.]

The entire Democratic strategy debate — "moderate" or move left? fight or compromise? — is based on a misreading of data. Voters don't think Dems are too progressive; they think Dems are weak. The actual math on what to do about this isn't even close!
New: www.gelliottmorris.com/p/new-poll-d...

When D3 was released in February 2011, it transformed how we build data visualizations for the web and ushered in a new age of unbridled creativity in information design, data journalism, and beyond. Today, it remains the backbone of modern, interactive data viz.

Happy 15th birthday, D3 🎂
d3js.org

tryCatch(
plums |>
icebox()|> mutate (
delicious=if _else(cold & sweet)
) -> me

error_no_breakfast=function(e) "forgive me"
)

It feels a little better at instruction following to me

A code editor containing R code with a panel on the right showing a comment from 'Tidy reviewer'. On the left, the workspace setup section loads various libraries including tidyverse, extraDistr, MASS, cmdstanr, and bayesplot. Three lines (tidyr, purrr, and ggplot2) are highlighted in red, indicating they've been flagged. The 'Tidy Reviewer' panel displays feedback explaining that these three packages are redundant because tidyverse already includes them, suggesting their removal to simplify dependencies.

In this @posit.co AI Newsletter, GGML joins hugging face, and some reflections on a Docs-style interface to LLM code review in #rstats.

posit.co/blog/2026-02...

Congratulations! The tidyverse team has selected YOU for our next ritual sacrifice of unbelievers! It is a great honour.

Have you tried prompting it to call Rscript -e? That’s the easiest starting point and what we do with Claude