What’s New in R: June 30, 2025
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring ggplot becoming an adult, a critique of vibe coding in scientific research, and updates to a tool for automatically formatting your R code. Let’s dive in!
ggplot turns 18
The famous package for data viz, {ggplot2}, recently turned 18. It’s hard to overstate the impact it has had. If you want to know more about its impact, this QZ article from a few years ago is a great place to start.
Vibe coding with AI agents is not for scientists
In this article, the team at seascape models lays out some reasons why so-called 'vibe coding' (i.e. letting AI write code from plain English prompts) may not a be a good fit for scientists. As the article puts it: “My experience of vibe coding is that it tends to make code that runs, but has mistakes in the critical places. This is very problematic if you do not manually check all the logic.”
air 0.7.0 Release
The Tidyverse team announces the release of Air 0.7.0. This tool, which works in both RStudio and Positron, allows you to easily format your code every time you save it. The 0.7.0 update brings some interesting changes, which are worth checking out.
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