Nic Crane
@niccrane.bsky.social
Independent R consultant. Apache Arrow PMC Member & #rstats 📦 maintainer. Arrow course launching early 2026: https://big-data-r.thinkific.com/ More of my stuff at https://niccrane.com/
Catching up on talks from AI in Production conference on YouTube starting with this one from @enpiar.bsky.social about exactly when to use and not use MCP. My highlight: learning why CLIs do the job some of the time but the specific circumstances where MCP can help! youtu.be/1mtWbxQE8S8?...
MCP, or Not MCP — Neal Richardson | AI in Production 2026
YouTube video by Jumping Rivers
youtu.be
I really enjoyed this excellent blog post from Mara considering the question of open source governance at a time where AI is completely changing the cost equation for open source contributions
Mara Averick@dataandme.bsky.social · 2w agoNot every open-source project wants more contributors right now, and that's fine. Four shapes maintainers run — walled castle, clique, university, hippie commune — and your `CONTRIBUTING.md` is saying the quiet part out loud. No wrong answer, just an honest one. blog.stdlib.io/do-you-want-...
Organizations that invest in shared infrastructure help keep R strong for everyone. Mike K. Smith: "Using open source without contributing back is not a sustainable model." Views are Mike's own. Learn why orgs join the R Consortium: r-consortium.org/about/join.h... @mikeksmith.bsky.social
I'm an R person who just shipped two cross-platform desktop apps in Rust + Tauri + React — a stack I'd never written before. One built straight in code with Claude, one designed first as a clickable artifact. Story: https://l.drmowinckels.io/sNeRrN
Ask a coding agent to run a curl-pipe-sh install command and it will — even if it notices the danger. I thought auto mode would protect you from this sort of danger but it doesn't: both Claude and Codex deliberately disable the sandbox. Read more at: tidydesign.substack.com/p/auto-mode-...
Auto mode knows it's dangerous (and does it anyway)
Ask a coding agent to run a curl-pipe-sh install command and it will — even if it notices the danger. I assumed auto mode with a sandbox would protect you from this sort of danger but it didn't: Claud...
tidydesign.substack.com
Using AI coding tools to *understand* rather than just *produce* code is 1 of my biggest wins as a dev. I spent 1 hour today with my "rapid learning" skill + ellmer internals that I never would have had the patience to have gone through in so much depth otherwise 😍 gist.github.com/thisisnic/dc...
Understanding the ellmer chat path
Understanding the ellmer chat path. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
gist.github.com
Is anyone else finding Bluesky really gross right now with all the AI replies to posts? I wanna talk human stuff with humans 😭
Reflecting on AI, and the fact that getting stuff done in open source requires a tolerance for making mistakes publicly and decoupling this from your self worth, which can be a constant effort.
Realising that there are not in fact enough hours in the day or week to write the VSCode Extension I dreamt up this morning, for stepwise code review on AI generated code, and I'm better off just having a reeeeally big coffee and getting on with it 😂
Happy to finally announce the CRAN release of {debrief}, a new package to let AI agents better interface with the output of the {profvis} package Making it so you can work with you AI agent more efficiently to profile and write faster R code! opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-06... #rstats #dataBS
Introducing debrief: profiling summaries for AI agents
debrief turns profvis profiling output into text-based summaries: hotspots, call trees, source context, and memory allocations, readable in the terminal and consumable by AI agents.
opensource.posit.co
Contributing to open source using AI can be a win for both maintainers and contributors, but it takes some thought to keep that balance. I wrote a blog post about some of the strategies I use when contributing to a new codebase. niccrane.com/posts/ai-ope... #rstats #ai #opensource
My Strategies for Using AI to Contribute to Open Source – Nic Crane
Nic Crane
niccrane.com
Trying to figure out whether the shift in my focus as a dev when creating code from "code-writer" to "AI-code reviewer" has made me super pernickety, or if I've just developed a new neurosis! 😆
A massive congrats to R Core for this great honour. R has been the foundation of my career and it wouldn’t have been possible without years of work from them.
The R Foundation@r-foundation.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics has been awarded to the R Project. #RStats www.rousseeuwprize.org/2026
This week's productive procrastination involved getting nerd-sniped by seeing if I could get real-time speech-to-text working in Shiny with the Speechmatics realtime API (my speechmatics #rstats 📦 published today on CRAN currently supports their batch API). This was fun though needs lots of work!
While many of the big LLM providers can do speech-to-text, I've enjoyed using this dedicated provider for transforming my voice notes into transcripts, and so wrapped a useful subset of their API in an #rstats package, which is now available on CRAN 🎉 cran.r-project.org/web/packages...
speechmatics: Client for the 'Speechmatics' Speech-to-Text API
Transcribe audio files using the 'Speechmatics' speech-to-text API <<a href="https://www.speechmatics.com/" target="_top">https://www.speechmatics.com/</a>>. Supports custom vocabulary, speaker ...
cran.r-project.org
Love this blog post! I've got something drafted to publish next week about how I try to use AI responsibly in my dev work, but this post sums up the main thread perfectly! #opensource #ai tombedor.dev/human-attent...
If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort | Tom Bedor's Blog
An ever-increasing volume of debug investigations, document writing, and code is written by robots. This has created a new etiquette question when working with a team - when is it OK to forward the ou...
tombedor.dev
Has anyone had much success in using AI for auto-triage on #opensource projects? I have plenty of success with using it interactively for this, but automatic never works for me because... 🧵
Extremely proud and excited that @ropensci.org's community manager @yabellini.bsky.social has been selected for a @sovereign.tech fellowship! It's a much-deserved recognition of her work making #rstats open to all, and a key endorsement of community-building as a fundamental pillar of open-source.
Sovereign Tech Agency@sovereign.tech · 2mo agoWe’re thrilled to announce the 2026 #SovereignTechFellowship cohort. Welcome to Jan Kowalleck, Philipp Sauberzweig, Pablo Neira Ayuso, Joris Van den Bossche, @yabellini.bsky.social, Denis Cornehl, Jakub Beránek, @mklu.bsky.social 1/2 www.sovereign.tech/news/meet-th...
This week on my substack: what is an agent open.substack.com/pub/tidydesi....
What is an agent?
Conversations, turns, rounds, tools, agents and more!
open.substack.com
Really excited to be on today's #DSLab! If you've ever wondered about what Parquet is and why you should use it, join us later today! 🎉 #rstats
Libby Heeren@libbyheeren.bsky.social · 2mo agoLearn all about PARQUET FILES 😍 on the #DSLab with us! TOMORROW, TUESDAY JUNE 2ND! WITH NIC CRANE! ( @niccrane.bsky.social) 12PM ET / 9AM PT REGISTER: pos.it/dslab #databs #rstats #pydata #CAPSLOCK
Reflecting on ways to protect against AI detracting from learning on projects; perhaps explicit goals/objectives (e.g. "be able to state the purpose of...") and setting *minimum* amounts of time for a task, to offset the feeling of productivity via speed + encourage exploring of the problem space
📢 Nic Crane (@niccrane.bsky.social) will be a keynote at #LatinR2026. 🤩 Nic is an independent #RStats consultant and educator, a maintainer of the Arrow R package, and a member of the Apache Arrow PMC. They also contribute to the ellmer package and are a leading voice on using LLMs in R #RLadies
open.substack.com/pub/thedatav... some thoughts and experiments on dashboarding in the age of AI #datafam #databs #datasky
Dead on Arrival: The AI Dashboard Problem
Three prompts, three dashboards, and what the analytics practitioner still has to bring to the table in the age of AI-driven visual analytics.
open.substack.com
Next to Loch Ken for the first time in 20 years. Different textures of smoke. First camp of the year. Perfection.
I'm considering submitting an application to the "Open Source for the Life Sciences Fund" + would love to hear from the community, specifically folks in life sciences, about any work that you'd like to see on Arrow, & the impact it'd have #rstats #apachearrow #opensource #lifesciences #biotech
YAY! Arrow on wasm! 🎉 github.com/apache/arrow... Thanks, @brycemecum.com!
GH-49981: [R][Packaging] Support building R package under r-universe/r-wasm by amoeba · Pull Request #49982 · apache/arrow
Rationale for this change Arrow C++ already supports Emscripten but the R package can't be built by either the r-wasm or r-universe projects in its current state. We just need to make the bundl...
github.com
Announcing the first ever @arrow.apache.org and #ApacheParquet meetup in Paris, kindly hosted by @datadoghq.com. If you’re using Arrow or Parquet, looking for insights, or wanting to meet other community members, this meetup is for you. Please register if you plan to attend! luma.com/6ed1oko1
Apache Arrow / Parquet - June 2026 meetup in Paris · Luma
Details We’re excited to announce the first ever Apache Arrow and Parquet meetup in Paris! This meetup will be hosted on June 18th by Datadog, in their…
luma.com
We're excited to announce the release of {arrow} 24.0.0 🏹📦 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
Changelog
arrow.apache.org