What’s New in R: August 31, 2026
Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring an Australian government report on AI and employment made entirely in R, a data-driven look at how much hotter Spain has gotten, and a primer on agent skills from R/Pharma. Let's dive in!
AI and employment in Australia
Matt Cowgill shared on Bluesky that this report from the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations was made entirely in R: every word, table, and chart. The report, written by the department's Office of the Chief Economist, examines whether occupations more exposed to AI have grown more slowly since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, and looks across a range of labour market indicators for signs of AI-related disruption. Beyond the findings themselves, it's a great example of what you can do working in R, producing a polished, publication-ready government report straight from code.
A data-driven normal for the Spain temperature chart
Dominic Royé looks at how temperatures in Spain have changed, comparing daily temperatures in 2025 against a 1961-1990 climate normal built from Open-Meteo reanalysis data for 60 Spanish cities, pulled in with the {ropenmeteo} package. If you've heard about the heat waves in Europe this summer, this post definitely shows it: 2025 ran about 1.8°C warmer than the historical normal, with nearly a hundred days above the 95th percentile and not a single day below the 5th. The data visualizations are great, and the full code to make the charts is included, drawing on packages like {geomtextpath}, {ggtext}, and {ggh4x}. It's a lovely example of climate communication done well in R.
Skills 101
In this talk from the 2026 R/Pharma GenAI Day, Isabella Velásquez gives an introduction to agent skills: specialized tools and behaviors you hand to a large language model so it can actually get things done. She covers what skills are, what they're not, and how they work under the hood, showing how agents use them to navigate complex data, execute tasks, and connect workflows. If you've been wanting to use skills in your own AI work but weren't sure where to start, this is a great way to get going. The page links to both the slides and a recording of the talk.
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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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