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Which raises the question: what if the people on the other side of the divide aren't more trusting, less curious, less experienced or otherwise less suited or less capable of making use of the tools? What if they're simply humanities people? Or worse, mechanical engineers?
In today's article, I write a summary of my experiences working with an LLM coding assistant for a week. Surprisingly, it's less negative than the article I expected to write. Unsurprisingly, it is still very, very negative and comes to the conclusion that LLM agents probably shouldn't be used for anything
rv is a new declarative command-line package manager for the R programming language written in Rust. Being declarative, I've found it to be far-and-away better at dependency resolution than any of the other package managers on the market, and being a command line tool rather than a tool to be called from inside an interactive R session makes it work much more agreeably with standard development workflows. In short, I really can't see myself recommending that anyone use any other tool for managing R dependencies any more.
In the last two chapters of this book we've gone through the basics of setting up a development container, building a package and writing some functions that perform basic mathematical tasks. What we've written, however, is all pretty trivial. Now, while teaching how to properly work with a truly large codebase is something that would take a book to teach in itself, we can certainly build something a bit more complex than the toy problems we've worked with so far. The question is: what?
As much as most of this year has been quite regrettable, my writing has been pretty successful. My main gripe going into 2025 was that my writing lacked unity and that I didn't really have a clear voice, and while I still write about quite a wide range of topics I think I'm starting to develop the outlines of a voice and a general thrust for my writing. The fact that my blog currently features both content marketing stuff and long-form essays is a little odd: I don't mind it exactly, but I'm considering mirroring some of the more marketing-oriented stuff on a website with nothing *but* that so that people who wish to work with me can be funnelled to the correct place more effectively. But I don't know...