02-AREAS

Twice a year, the tidyverse team sets a week aside for “spring cleaning,” bringing all of our R packages up to snuff with the most current tooling and standardizing various bits of our development process. Some of these updates can happen by calling a single function, while others are much more involved. One of those more involved updates is updating erroring code, transitioning away from base R (e.g.  stop()), rlang (e.g.  rlang::abort()), glue, and homegrown combinations of them. cli’s new syntax is easier to work with as a developer and more visually pleasing as a user.

In some cases, transitioning is almost as simple as Finding + Replacing rlang::abort() to cli::cli_abort():

# before: rlang::abort("`save_pred` can only be used if the initial results saved predictions.") # after: cli::cli_abort("{.arg save_pred} can only be used if the initial results saved predictions.")

In others, there’s a mess of ad-hoc pluralization, paste0()s, glue interpolations, and other assorted nonsense to sort through:

Thus was born clipal1, a (now-superseded) R package that allows users to select erroring code, press a keyboard shortcut, wait a moment, and watch the updated code be inlined in to the selection.

clipal was a huge boost for us in the most recent spring cleaning. Depending on the code being updated, these erroring calls used to take 30 seconds to a few minutes. With clipal, though, the model could usually get the updated code 80% or 90% of the way there in a couple seconds. Up to this point, irritated by autocomplete and frustrated by the friction of copying and pasting code and typing out the same bits of context into chats again and again, I had been relatively skeptical that LLMs could make me more productive. After using clipal for a week, though, I began to understand how seamlessly LLMs could automate the cumbersome and uninteresting parts of my work.

clipal itself is now superseded by pal, a more general solution to the problem that clipal solved. I’ve also written two additional packages like pal that solve two other classes of pal-like problems using similar tools, ensure and gander. In this post, I’ll write a bit about how I’ve used a pair of tools in three experiments that have made me much more productive as an R developer

After using clipal during our spring cleaning, I approached another spring cleaning task for the week: updating testing code. testthat 3.0.0 was released in 2020, bringing with it numerous changes that were both huge quality of life improvements for package developers and also highly breaking changes. While some of the task of converting legacy unit testing code to testthat 3e is relatively straightforward, other components can be quite tedious. Could I do the same thing for updating to testthat 3e that I did for transitioning to cli? I sloppily threw together a sister package to clipal that would convert tests for errors to snapshot tests, disentangle nested expectations, and transition from deprecated functions like ⁠expect_known_*(). ⁠(If you’re interested, the current prompt for that functionality is here.) That sister package was also a huge boost for me, but the package reused as-is almost every piece of code from clipal other than the prompt. Thus, I realized that the proper solution would provide all of this scaffolding to attach a prompt to a keyboard shortcut, but allow for an arbitrary set of prompts to help automate these wonky, cumbersome tasks.

The next week, pal was born. The pal package ships with three prompts centered on package development: the cli pal and testthat pal mentioned previously, as well as the roxygen pal, which drafts minimal roxygen documentation based on a function definition. Here’s what pal’s interface looks like now:

ensure

While deciding on the initial set of prompts that pal would include, I really wanted to include some sort of “write unit tests for this function” pal. To really address this problem, though, requires violating two of pal’s core assumptions:

All of the context that you need is in the selection and the prompt. In the case of writing unit tests, it’s actually pretty important to have other pieces of context. If a package provides some object type potato, in order to write tests for some function that takes potato as input, it’s likely very important to know how potatoes are created and the kinds of properties they have. pal’s sister package for writing unit tests, ensure, can thus “see” the rest of the file that you’re working on, as well as context from neighboring files like other .R source files, the corresponding test file, and package vignettes, to learn about how to interface with the function arguments being tested.

The LLM’s response can prefix, replace, or suffix the active selection in the same file. In the case of writing unit tests for R, the place that tests actually ought to go is in a corresponding test file in tests/testthat/. Via the RStudio API, ensure can open up the corresponding test file and write to it rather than the source file where it was triggered from.3

gander

Examples @examples provides executable R code showing how to use the function in practice. This is a very important part of the documentation because many people look at the examples before reading anything. Example code must work without errors as it is run automatically as part of R CMD check. For the purpose of illustration, it’s often useful to include code that causes an error. You can do this by wrapping the code in try() or using \dontrun{} to exclude from the executed example code. For finer control, you can use @examplesIf: #' @examplesIf interactive() #' browseURL("https://roxygen2.r-lib.org")

Instead of including examples directly in the documentation, you can put them in separate files and use @example path/relative/to/package/root to insert them into the documentation. All functions must have examples for initial CRAN submission.

Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Faster development cycles: Code suggestions and automation reduce time spent on repetitive tasks. Improved code quality: AI tools identify bugs or security risks that may go unnoticed by manual reviews. Enhanced learning: Engineers can receive real-time feedback or even ask AI for code explanations to learn new patterns or frameworks.

GitHub Copilot is a game-changer for writing code. Powered by OpenAI’s Codex model, Copilot suggests lines of code based on the context of what you’re writing. It’s especially useful when you’re working with repetitive tasks or writing boilerplate code.

ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, is not just a tool for casual conversations. It can be used to ask technical questions, explain difficult code, or even generate ideas for solving specific coding problems. Developers often use it for quick consultations — whether it’s about debugging or understanding the intricacies of a particular algorithm.

AI-Assisted System Architecture and Design As AI becomes more sophisticated, it may start to play a role in designing system architectures. Currently, system design is one of the more complex tasks that engineers handle, requiring a deep understanding of the trade-offs between different architectural patterns (monolithic vs. microservices, synchronous vs. asynchronous communication, etc.). Future AI tools could help design optimal architectures by analyzing the specific needs of a project, performance goals, and scalability requirements. AI could suggest which patterns, frameworks, or technologies are best suited for a given application. It could even generate architecture diagrams, API designs, or database schemas based on historical data from similar projects. This would revolutionize system design, making it faster and more accessible to engineers of all levels. While experienced architects would still be needed to make judgment calls, AI could drastically reduce the time spent on initial design phases, especially in large and complex systems.