AI Application Development

What Happened In Positron 2026.10, preview features extend Posit Assistant beyond the Console and Editor into more of the IDE. With Assistant: Preview Features enabled, it can use package and interpreter information to install packages, check installed packages for active CVEs, answer questions about R and Python installations, and help set up environments. It can…

What Happened Great Tables reached v1.0.0 in late September, followed three weeks later by v1.1.0. The 1.x release establishes a settled core API; v1.1.0 fixes more than 60 bugs, largely in number formatting, and improves LaTeX output. [1] The releases add formatters for fractions, indexes, chemical notation, URLs and email addresses; value-, regex- and predicate-based…

What Happened rig 0.10.0 and 0.11.0 introduced rig proj, a project workflow built around an rproj.toml manifest and an rproj.lock file. Teams can initialize a project, import dependencies from DESCRIPTION or an renv lock file, declare regular, development and optional dependencies, and lock exact package versions. rig proj sync creates a recreatable .rvenv environment; rig…

What Happened Positron’s October release adds a preview of Posit Assistant tools for apps, connections, interpreters, and publishing. An experimental MCP server can let external agents work in live R and Python sessions. Both capabilities require explicit settings to enable [1]. Data Connections is now on by default, replacing the older Connections pane and Catalog…

What Happened Rig 0.11.0 expands rig pkg, the R package-management commands introduced across versions 0.10.0 and 0.11.0. They can install, remove, list, check, inspect and search packages. Installation accepts CRAN-like repositories, git and GitHub sources, URLs, local files and version constraints. Rig caches files, skips redundant work, parallelizes downloads and builds, and rejects incompatible dependency…

What Happened Recent Posit work puts reliability ahead of a polished chat interface. A posit::conf demonstration showed an assistant asking about cleaning decisions, warning that a conclusion relied on only 32 flights, and producing a reproducible Quarto report. The new open-source commons package lets teams prioritize vetted calculations, then data-team context, and finally agent-written code,…

What Happened Posit announced commons 0.1.0 for trustworthy data-analysis agents and Quarto Hub for real-time collaboration. It also took over maintenance of the Snowflake R packages skiLift and skiPatrol [1]. Recent releases include ellmer 0.5.0 for LLM workflows, vitals 0.4.0 for agent comparisons and smaller logs, and ggsql 0.5.0 in beta. Orbital 0.7.0 and tidypredict…

What Happened Two toolchain releases expand how teams build interactive data and AI applications with Shiny and conversational tooling. shinyreact — a new package that lets you write the Shiny app UI in React while keeping the Shiny server as the reactive computation engine. The client is served from www/ (page_react() or set_react_page()),…

Findings [1] 2026-09-24 ggsql 0.5.0: Readers, Writers, and Beta status We are absolutely thrilled to announce the release of ggsql 0.5.0, the first beta release of ggsql since the initial release back in April. While this release brings a lot of core improvements, the beta label marks the maturity of… Text is important in…

Findings [1] 2026-09-22 Notebooks-On-Demand (Nod): A JupyterLab Extension for a Notebook Anywhere https://medium.com/media/a60eb3591c012c82df522064eee8175f/hrefNod: Notebooks-on-Demand is an open-source JupyterLab extension that lets you jump into a Jupyter notebook from anywhere in a Python codebase. Just call notebook() from anywhere in your .py file, run it with nod, and a notebook opens at that point… It lets…

What Happened Posit-related packages released coordinated updates that target trustworthy agent behavior, improved chat UX, and lower token costs. Key items: commons 0.1.0 (CRAN; Python pre-release): a framework for building self‑service, trustworthy data‑analysis agents that prefer vetted calculations, mark answers “verified” when using vetted code, search trusted context before emitting new R/Python/SQL code,…

What Happened Posit's shinychat released coordinated updates for R (v0.5.0) and Python (v0.7.1). The packages provide first-class chat application primitives and full-window app containers, and pair with model client libraries (ellmer in R, chatlas in Python). Install with install.packages("shinychat") or pip install -U shinychat and use page_chat()/chat_ui()/chat_server() in R or Chat(...).app() in Python to run…