RStudio is used by about 2 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, we figured a tool like this one could be quite useful.

Both of us 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. We saw how integrated code assistants were taking off in other IDEs, but we 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.

To bring the Cursor-like experience to RStudio users, we built Rao (https://www.lotas.ai/): 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.

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.

You can download Rao at https://www.lotas.ai/download, watch our demo on the homepage (https://www.lotas.ai/), and work through some example use cases on our GitHub (https://github.com/lotas-ai/rao/tree/main/demos). We have a one-week free trial (no card required) and provide 500 queries/month for $20/month after that. We’d love to hear feedback from the HN community to make Rao as useful as possible! You can reach us at founders@lotas.ai.

P.S. We have zero data retention (ZDR) agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic, but we currently recommend users do not input sensitive or regulated data like PHI into Rao until we sign BAAs with both model providers. For more information on our security practices, please visit the security page on our website https://www.lotas.ai/security.