Modern package development with Positron + AI

Hadley Wickham on modern R package development with Positron and AI coding assistants, covering testing and refactoring, at WOMBAT 2026.
Published

November 30, 2026

November 30, 01:30 PM

Modern package development with Positron + AI

In this workshop, I'll give an update on the package development tooling that I use today. I'll show you how I use Positron with Posit Assistant (and Claude code and codex) to maintain and develop new packages. AI is both an amplifier and enabler of software engineering best practices, so I'll focus on how I use unit testing, test coverage, and refactoring to produce reliable, high-quality software than ever before.

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Hadley Wickham

Hadley Wickham

Hadley is Chief Scientist at Posit PBC, winner of the 2019 COPSS award, and a member of the R Foundation. He builds tools (both computational and cognitive) to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science (like the tidyverse, which includes ggplot2, dplyr, and tidyr) and principled software development (e.g. roxygen2, testthat, and pkgdown). He is also a writer, educator, and speaker promoting the use of R for data science. Learn more on his website, .