This was a colossal amount of work but I could not be happier that #rstats has a serious OpenTelemetry story now.

Charlie Gao@shikokuchuo.net · 3mo ago

OpenTelemetry has come to R 🎉 Shiny, plumber2, mirai, httr2, ellmer, knitr, testthat, and DBI are now instrumented: production-grade traces from R with no code changes. Set a few env vars and telemetry flows to the backend of your choice. Full write-up: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-05... #Rstats

This release has some nice ergonomic improvements for #rstats users querying Snowflake or Databricks. I'm excited about the potential of the workload identity functionality in particular.

Simon P. Couch@simonpcouch.com · 3mo ago

odbc 1.7.0, an #rstats pkg that allows users to connect to ODBC databases, is now on CRAN! This release tightens integration with Databricks and Snowflake, in addition to a few provider-agnostic bug fixes. github.com/r-dbi/odbc/r...

{otel} + #rstats is becoming a crazy partnership. This project has driven me to use/write {promises} in ways that makes my 🧠 ache 😅. The reward is worth it! See you at #PositConf2025 where I'll talk about this in more detail

Aaron Jacobs@atheriel.bsky.social · 11mo ago

More #rstats + OpenTelemetry news: @schloerke.com finally got all of the async issues in {ellmer} and {shiny} sorted out and tracing now works! Here's what combining {shiny} + {ellmer} + {httr2} + {mirai} + {otel} looks like today. (All credit for the screenshots to @schloerke.com.)

More #rstats + OpenTelemetry news: @schloerke.com finally got all of the async issues in {ellmer} and {shiny} sorted out and tracing now works! Here's what combining {shiny} + {ellmer} + {httr2} + {mirai} + {otel} looks like today. (All credit for the screenshots to @schloerke.com.)

The internals of {ellmer} are like the final boss of modern #rstats package codebases: S7, httr2, promises, and coro *everywhere*. It really shows how to push the limit of what can be done with R.

More #rstats OpenTelemetry tidbits: I've revived the PR that adds instrumentation to the {httr2} package. Here is what is looks like to run {httr2}'s own test suite while looked up to Logfire:

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!

Charlie Gao@shikokuchuo.net · 11mo ago

tidyverse blog: mirai 2.5.0 www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/09... This milestone release delivers enhanced observability through OpenTelemetry, reproducible parallel RNG, and key user interface improvements. We’ve also packed in twice as many changes as usual! #Rstats #tidyverse

In the last few months I've worked a fair bit in Typescript building "VS Code" extensions for #Positron. It's my first time using that language or the extension APIs, and I have to say that the teams at Microsoft have done some incredible work on both.

Somehow, for the third time in my life, I'm wondering if I need to write a #linux NSS module to solve my problems...

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...

Introducing Databot: an AI assistant for exploratory data analysis in #Python and #RStats! A research preview in Positron, Databot is a tireless pair programmer to help you explore data. Learn more about this tool and our philosophy behind it: 🤖 posit.co/blog/introdu... ⚠️ posit.co/blog/databot...

Announcing the Posit Publisher VS Code extension! This new tool makes it easy for #RStats and #Python users to deploy data science content, like Shiny apps, Quarto docs, and Jupyter notebooks, from #VSCode and Positron directly to Posit Connect. Learn more and install open-vsx.org/extension/po...

🐘 ellmer 🐘 makes it easy and fun to use LLMs from #rstats, and 0.3.0 is out now. Read about the new streamlined chat() function, improvements to tool specifications, and more at www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/07....

ellmer 0.3.0

The newest version of ellmer introduces a simpler `chat()` interface that can works with any provider, a bunch of improvements to tool calling, and a handful of smaller quality of life improvements.

tidyverse.org

We're having a hard time figuring out the correct (minimal-permission) API scope for using Vertex AI from the #rstats {ellmer} package. If you have access to Vertex (we don't) and want to test, here is where to start: github.com/tidyverse/el... github.com/tidyverse/el... github.com/tidyverse/el...

Update API endpoint for Vertex AI, use working scope for auth by netique · Pull Request #598 · tidyverse/ellmer

github.com

Ever wonder how the #tidyverse came to be? 🤔 #TheTestSet's first episode features @hadley.nz on his accidental empire of #RStats packages, bear encounters, and more! Stream it at thetestset.co, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. #DataAnalytics #PodcastLaunch

Small #rstats improvement for folks interested in RAG with {ragnar} (and just in time for their conference): github.com/tidyverse/ra...

Add support for using embedding models from Databricks by atheriel · Pull Request #45 · tidyverse/ragnar

Databricks hosts a couple of dedicated text embedding models through their Foundation Models API. This commit introduces embed_databricks() to give ragnar users access to them. Note that this is a ...

github.com

For those following the #rstats {ellmer} package: I got the chat_databricks() and chat_snowflake() providers working with tool calling this past week. IMHO this means these providers are no longer toys: they can be used with RAG (via {ragnar}) and other complex tasks like @simonpcouch.com's {btw}.

Second pass: traces from a RAG in Langfuse constructed using both #rstats {ragnar} and {ellmer}. This shows a tool call out to a text embedding model as well as a general-purpose one, which is a bit more realistic (and interesting).

Currently wiring up a simple #rstats ellmer chatbot to send traces to Langfuse. These LLM observability platforms have some pretty slick UI:

Want to easily use LLMs from R? ellmer 0.2.0 provides: • Batch & parallel processing • A universal parameter interface • Cost tracking • Support for Mistral, Hugging Face, & Portkey And much more! Read all about it at: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/05... #rstats

ellmer 0.2.0

ellmer 0.2.0 lands with a swag of upgrades: Garrick Aden‑Buie joins the team, we make a couple of breaking changes, and add serious scale with `parallel_chat()` and `batch_chat()`. A new `params()` ...

tidyverse.org

Thanks to some great work from @gaborcsardi.org my longstanding dream of bringing high-quality OpenTelemetry tooling to #rstats is starting to get off the ground.

New in #rstats R4.5.0: `parallel::makeCluster(6, "MIRAI")` creates a parallel mirai cluster with 6 nodes. Yes that's right, mirai is now officially a base R cluster type! mirai.r-lib.org Result of work from the R Project Sprint in Warwick 2023 in collaboration with Luke Tierney (R Core).

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/

Does it still count as conference-driven development if you're not actually going to the conference?

Both Snowflake and Databricks have made improvements to their LLM APIs in recent months (particularly around tool calling and structured outputs). I'm hoping to surface many of these to #rstats users in the next {ellmer} release.

Me and a lot of people from all over the world talk about just how dead R is; like so dead. www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremy...

#rstats #thewideworldofr #datascience | Jeremy Allen | 132 comments

R is so dead that there are thousands of economists, actuaries, statisticians, bioinformaticists, epidemiologists, biologists, ecologists, geologists, geographers, psychologists, demographers, sociolo...

linkedin.com

✨Use llms from #rstats with ellmer ✨Version 0.2.0 is on CRAN now. No blog post yet because I'm about to go on vacation, but in the meantime you can check out the release notes: github.com/tidyverse/el....

odbc 1.6.0 is now on #rstats CRAN! Includes a new helper for Redshift, a hex sticker (finally!), and many QOL improvements for Databricks, Snowflake, MSSQL, etc. Read more: odbc.r-dbi.org/news/index.h...

A long-awaited update of the #rstats {odbc} package is now on CRAN. It includes a cool new odbc::redshift() helper I wrote to make it easier to use IAM credentials, plus some #posit Connect goodies. (And thanks to @simonpcouch.com for managing the release!) cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

We are delighted to announce the release of ellmer, an R package for accessing the power of LLMs in R! ellmer supports a variety of model providers. Chat, tool call, stream API calls, extract structured data, and more! Learn about it here: posit.co/blog/announc... #RStats #AI #LLM