Coding agents for data tasks

LLMs for Data Analysis in R

R/Medicine 2026

What is an agent?

finally (or almost finally) we’re going to talk about using coding agnets for data tasks.

so first, what is an agent? An agent is essentially an LLM that can execute tools in a loop — it can observe, act, observe the result, and act again.

or in simpler terms:

• Can gather information from the environment
  • e.g., what files are in a directory?
• Can alter the environment
  • e.g., write a dataset to a file

you might have heard about claude code click or codex click these are coding agents, they are pretty useful for writing code. there are a bunch of these, you might have your own bespoke one, one that lives in whatever environment you write code in. they are everwhere today.

posit has posit assistant lives in rstudio and positron (also available as a tui)

we are just going to briefly talk about posit assistant but what we are going to talk about will broadly apply to many coding agents

Posit Assistant

Posit Assistant is an AI coding assistant built into rstudio/Positron. You can use it to help you write code — including Shiny apps.

it is very new!!

• Coding / data analysis agent in RStudio and Positron

• Works with R and Python

• Access to your R/Python session

• Successor to Databot

Demo

Let me show you Posit Assistant in action. use to look at health data, write report point out thinking and model choice

in rstudio, you currently have to have posit ai account. we will be giving you access for this workshop in positron, you can bring your own key

Add memory with AGENTS.md

lets talk about customizing. this info generalizes to other coding agents. AGENTS.md is a memory file that gives Posit Assistant persistent context about your project. It loads automatically at the start of every conversation.

• Markdown file that stores persistent context about your project

• Loaded automatically at the start of every conversation

• Include info like project structure, coding conventions, preferred libraries, etc.

Skills

Skills are specialized knowledge modules that extend Posit Assistant. They load automatically when relevant — no manual activation needed.

• Specialized knowledge modules that load automatically when relevant

• Built-in skills include shiny-bslib, quarto-authoring, and more

• Create your own: project-level (.positai/skills/) or user-level (~/.positai/skills/)

Our Turn: Set up Posit Assistant

send login

Your Turn: Extend the querychat app

Use Posit Assistant to help you add features to the querychat app — like embedding it in a Shiny app with a plot or table. You don’t need to know Shiny — the assistant will help you write the code.

1. Open _exercises/08_posit-assistant/08_posit-assistant-app.R and run it to confirm it works.

2. Open Posit Assistant (sidebar or Cmd+Shift+P > “Assistant”).

3. Ask it to help you extend the app (for example, add a plot).

4. Run the app and continue iterating.

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