Welcome!

Getting Started with LLM APIs in R

R/Pharma 2025

2025-11-03

Welcome to Getting Started with LLM APIs in R!

Workshop repo: https://bit.ly/r-pharma-llm

☁️ Set up Posit Cloud:

1. Sign up for a free Posit Cloud account: https://posit.cloud/plans.
2. Join our workspace on Posit Cloud: https://bit.ly/llm-cloud.
3. Go to Content, then select the r-pharma-llm project.

👋

Sara Altman

Senior Developer Advocate, AI Core

Posit

@skaltman

@sara-altman.bsky.social

About this workshop

🏡 skaltman.github.io/r-pharma-llm

All slides and info lives here!

You can follow along with the slides here also includes set up instructions for posit cloud, but i’ll give you some time to set up soon

Workshop format

📊 Slides

💻 Demos

✏️ Exercises on Posit Cloud

Ask questions at any point in the chat

we’ll have lecture components with slides demos where I’ll show demo something and we’ll discuss how it works and interactive exercises where you’ll do some coding for these, I’ve set up a posit cloud project for you with everything you’ll need including api keys

if you have questions, you can put them in the chat at any time I can’t promise that I’ll see them while I’m talking, but during the exercise portions I’ll monitor it and also consolidate questions to answer when we regroup

Schedule

Time		Activity
01:00 - 01:15	👋	Intro
01:15 - 01:55	💬	Anatomy of a conversation
01:55 - 02:25	💻	Programming with LLMs
02:25 - 02:40	✍️	Prompt engineering
02:40 - 03:00	🛠️	Tool calling

here’s a rough schedule of what we’re going to be covering today this is only a two hour workshop, so there’s a lot more to discover afterwards

my goal is to show you what’s possible with llm apis from r and give you a good strating point so you’ll walk away understanding the basics of how to call llm apis from R, build basic chatbots, hook LLMs up to external tools, and do some system prompt designing

File organization

_exercises/	Files for Your Turn exercises
_solutions/	Solutions to those exercises
_demos/	Files for demos

Let’s Dive In!

To use an AI API…

…you need an API key!

How to get an API key, beyond this workshop

1. 🆙 Sign up for an account with OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.

2. 💳 Add a payment method

3. 🔑 Get an API key

4. 💾 Store it in .Renviron file
   as OPENAI_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, etc.

this is likely what you’ll want to do if you want to run the exercises locally after this workshop is over

But we’ll give you API keys to use today!

1. Use these keys for all of our activities today – they are already set up in Posit Cloud!

2. Play and explore! But please be considerate :)

3. We’ll turn them off at the end of the workshop

already set up in posit cloud

Your Turn

☁️ Set up Posit Cloud:

1. Sign up for a free Posit Cloud account: https://posit.cloud/plans.

2. Join our workspace on Posit Cloud: https://bit.ly/llm-cloud.

3. Go to Content, then select the r-pharma-llm project.

🤖 Check that everything’s working:

• Run the code in _exercises/01_hello-llm

06:00