A major milestone for leveraging LLMs in R just landed with the new ellmer package, along with a terrific showcase of retrieval-augmented generation combining ellmer and DuckDB. Plus an inspiring roundup of the recent Closeread contest winners.
Episode Links
* This week's curator: Sam Parmar - @parmsam@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) & @parmsam_ (X/Twitter) * Announcing ellmer: A package for interacting with Large Language Models in R * Rapid RAG Prototyping: Building a Retrieval Augmented Generation Prototype with ellmer and DuckDB * Winners of the Closeread Prize – Data-Driven Scrollytelling with Quarto * Entire issue available at rweekly.org/2025-W10

Supplement Resources
* Coder Radio episode 608 - R with Eric Nantz https://coder.show/608 * nhyris - The minimal framework for transform R shiny application into standalone

Supporting the show
* Use the contact page at https://serve.podhome.fm/custompage/r-weekly-highlights/contact to send us your feedback * R-Weekly Highlights on the Podcastindex.org - You can send a boost into the show directly in the Podcast Index. First, top-up with Alby, and then head over to the R-Weekly Highlights podcast entry on the index. * A new way to think about value: https://value4value.info * Get in touch with us on social media + Eric Nantz: @rpodcast@podcastindex.social (Mastodon), @rpodcast.bsky.social (BlueSky) and @theRcast (X/Twitter) + Mike Thomas: @mike_thomas@fosstodon.org (Mastodon), @mike-thomas.bsky.social (BlueSky), and @mike_ketchbrook (X/Twitter)

Music credits powered by OCRemix
* Watermelon Flava - Breath of Fire III - Joshua Morse, posu yan - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01411 * Stomp the Summer Sky - Secret of Mana - Ziwtra - https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00859