R Weekly 2026-W04 Automate PR's with Claude, Accessible line charts

20 Jan 2026

• How to have (my) content shared by R Weekly?

This week’s release was curated by Jon Calder, with help from the R Weekly team members and contributors.

Highlight

• Semi-automating 200 Pull Requests with Claude Code

• How to create a more accessible line chart

Insights

• From scripts to pipelines in the age of LLMs

• Contributing to base R with Coding Equity and Joy - Inside the R Contributors Project

• Crops, Code, and Community Build R-Mob User Group in Australia

• 2025 Posit Open Source Year in Review

• Semi-automating 200 Pull Requests with Claude Code

R in the Real World

• Gold/Silver Ratio: GenAI with Quant Agent on Azure AI Foundry

Tutorials

• How to create a more accessible line chart

• Setting Up A Cluster of Tiny PCs For Parallel Computing - A Note To Myself

Resources

• Hello Data Science Book

• Statistical rethinking 2 with brms and the tidyverse

• Creating Effective Display Tables with the gt Package

New Packages

📦 Keep up to date wtih CRANberries 📦

CRAN

• {AddiVortes} 0.4.8: (Bayesian) Additive Voronoi Tessellations

• {blastar} 0.1.1: BLAST and Sequence Analysis Tools

• {blockr} 0.1.0: A Block-Based Framework for Data Manipulation and Visualization

• {blvim} 0.1.1: Boltzmann–Lotka–Volterra Interaction Model

• {frontmatter} 0.1.0: Parse Front Matter from Documents

• {mascarade} 0.3.0: Generating Cluster Masks for Single-Cell Dimensional Reduction Plots

• {querychat} 0.2.0: Filter and Query Data Frames in ‘shiny’ Using an LLM Chat Interface

• {rjd3toolkit} 3.6.0: Utility Functions Around ‘JDemetra+ 3.0’

Updated Packages

🔍 Search on R-universe 🔍

• {admiral} 1.4: ADaM in R Asset Library - diffify

• {distributional} 0.6.0: Vectorised Probability Distributions - diffify

• {future} 1.69.0: Unified Parallel and Distributed Processing in R for Everyone - diffify

• {mapSpain} 1.0.0: Administrative Boundaries of Spain - diffify

• {qol} 1.2.0: Powerful ‘SAS’ Inspired Concepts for more Efficient Bigger Outputs - diffify

• {ranger} 0.18.0: A Fast Implementation of Random Forests - diffify

• {RcppAnnoy} 0.0.23: ‘Rcpp’ Bindings for ‘Annoy’, a Library for Approximate Nearest Neighbors - diffify

• {renv} 1.1.6: Project Environments - diffify

• {survival} 3.8-6: Survival Analysis - diffify

• {vctrs} 0.7.0: Vector Helpers - diffify

Videos and Podcasts

• Listen to the R-Weekly Highlights Podcast

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core:

Call for Participation

• Open call for the rOpenSci Champions Program 2026!

• Posit::conf(2026) Call for Talks

Upcoming Events in 3 Months

Events in 3 Months:

• A list of R conferences and meetings

• This week’s local R-User and applied stats events

• Weekly R Workshops for Ukraine

Connect

Join the Data Science Learning Community

Quotes of the Week

I FINALLY added the air #RStats formatter in Positron so it formats each time I save - and it is magical. Fixes indents! Puts things on the correct lines! Info: positron.posit.co/guide-r-air....

[image or embed]

— Sharon Machlis (@smachlis.bsky.social) 15 January 2026 at 20:45

A great use-case for Nano Banana Pro: creating #rstats hex logos. It used to take me hours to put these logos together (I'm not a graphic designer), but logos really help with branding R packages. With Nano Banana I feed Gemini the package spec, iterate, and get great results.

[image or embed]

— Kyle Walker (@kylewalker.bsky.social) 16 January 2026 at 16:16