Lotas recently launched!

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^{"The first AI assistant for RStudio's 5 million users."}

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c47Ch1kB0eU\

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Founded by Jorge Guerra & William Nickols‍

Hey everyone! Meet Jorge (pictured on the right) and Will (pictured on the left) from Lotas. They’ve built an AI coding assistant into RStudio (think Cursor for RStudio), and they're looking for RStudio users, data scientists, and students who want to code way faster.

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👨🎓 Who The Founders Are

Both of the founders were PhD students at Harvard. Jorge was in the biophysics program and Will was in the biostatistics program where most people used RStudio every day. They saw how integrated coding assistants were taking off in other IDEs, but they noticed that the RStudio integrations were still lagging far behind. Many R users were copying and pasting code from ChatGPT to build their workflows, and this was clearly slow and fragile.

Other AI data science tools are either (1) built on the web or in environments people don’t already use, (2) are completely focused on python notebooks, or (3) are weak package-based assistants with limited functionality. Rao is exactly like the RStudio IDE that millions of data scientists already use, but it incorporates a powerful AI assistant and works with all the standard file types.

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❌ Problem

RStudio is used by about 5 million data scientists and academics, but they currently lack a coding assistant within their IDE. Developers in other environments benefit from tools like Cursor and Windsurf, but R users don’t have any equivalent tools to speed up their workflow. Since ~80% of R programmers prefer to use RStudio over other IDEs like VSCode to write R code, the Lotas founders figured a tool like this one could be quite useful.

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✅ Solution

To bring the Cursor-like experience to RStudio users, the Lotas founders built Rao: a fork of RStudio with an embedded AI assistant that is aware of the user’s local context (both files and variable environment), can read and write files, can run code or commands, and can interpret textual or visual output. It works with any of the file formats already in RStudio (R, notebooks including RMDs and QMDs, Python, Stan, etc.), allowing R programmers to iteratively perform entire data analyses inside their preferred IDE.

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🚀 Use Rao

You can download Rao, watch the demo, and work through some example use cases. The founders would love to hear feedback to make Rao as useful as possible!

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Learn More

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^{🌐 Visit www.lotas.ai to learn more.}

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^{📧 You can reach Jorge and Will via email here.}

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^{👣 Follow Lotas on LinkedIn & X.}

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