What’s New in R: May 26, 2026
Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a look at how Posit arrived at its new AI tooling, a video walkthrough of Posit Assistant in RStudio from Hadley Wickham, and an R package for adding narrative roadmap footers to your Quarto presentations. Let's dive in!
2026-03-27 AI Newsletter
Sara Altman and Simon Couch trace the path Posit has taken in thinking about AI tools for data science, from early experiments like Shiny Assistant and Databot through to the recent release of Posit Assistant. It's a useful bit of history that explains the reasoning behind how their tools are designed and why they landed where they did. If you've been curious about Posit Assistant and want to understand the philosophy behind it, this is a great place to start.
Analyzing a TidyTuesday dataset with Posit Assistant in RStudio
Hadley Wickham gives a hands-on demonstration of using Posit Assistant inside RStudio to analyze a TidyTuesday dataset. It's a really nice example of what working alongside the assistant actually looks like in practice, with all the back-and-forth of real exploratory data analysis. If you read the Posit AI newsletter above and want to see the tool in action, this is the natural follow-up.
deckroadmap: Give your slides a sense of direction
Tiger Tang's {deckroadmap} package adds roadmap footers to Reveal.js presentations made with Quarto, helping your audience get oriented to where they are in your talk and what's still to come. Unlike a standard progress bar that just shows linear distance, the roadmap reflects the narrative structure of your deck so people can follow the shape of your argument. You define your sections, tag each slide with a {data-roadmap} attribute, and pick from three built-in styles. A small touch, but a thoughtful one for anyone who gives presentations in Quarto.
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Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below!
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