[HN Gopher] Show HN: Lotas - Cursor for RStudio
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Show HN: Lotas - Cursor for RStudio
Hey HN! We're Jorge and Will from Lotas (https://www.lotas.ai/),
and we've built an AI coding assistant into RStudio (think Cursor
for RStudio). 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.
Author : jorgeoguerra
Score : 43 points
Date : 2025-07-21 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lotas.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lotas.ai)
| xnx wrote:
| Is this better than Positron Assistant?
| https://positron.posit.co/assistant.html
| jorgeoguerra wrote:
| Positron is solid, but we think our search and apply-edit is
| better at the moment and we think more people use RStudio right
| now.
|
| Practically, Positron also requires you to use your own LLM
| keys (so you're on the hook for the tokens/long context, and if
| you don't have a BAA or ZDR, you may not be able to use it with
| sensitive data). For Rao, we manage the tokens and are moving
| quickly towards HIPAA/SOC 2.
|
| We also plan to develop something similar to Positron in the
| future.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > RStudio is used by about 2 million data scientists and
| academics, but they currently lack a coding assistant within
| their IDE.
|
| Not to take anything away from your announcement, but Github
| Copilot works in RStudio.
| jorgeoguerra wrote:
| GitHub co-pilot is great for line completion, but we meant more
| like Cursor's agentic ability.
| pteetor wrote:
| Somehow, I assumed that a Cursor-like capability for RStudio
| would be implemented as an add-in extension, not via fork. Does
| this mean that every new release of RStudio will require a
| rebuild by Lotas and a re-download by its users?
| jorgeoguerra wrote:
| There's a lot of that had to be changed at a pretty deep level
| to build this assistant. So an add-on wasn't really feasible.
| behnamoh wrote:
| This tactic is usually used to attract VC money down the road.
| VCs don't typically invest in plugins/add-ons; they prefer
| products.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Can this be run on-prem (like rstudio server) against OpenAI API
| compatible LLMs (i.e internal deployments)?
| WillNickols wrote:
| It can, but it'll take more set up since there's a backend we
| have configured that does the actual LLM communication. You'd
| need to set that up internally for an on-prem deployment. Can
| you send us a message (https://www.lotas.ai/contact) if you
| want to talk more?
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Not a fan of coding agents but really appreciate the indirect
| love for RStudio.
| benjamin621 wrote:
| This looks really useful for scientific analysis -- looking
| forward to trying it!
| demirev wrote:
| I've wondered when something like this will pop-up. Cursor just
| doesn't lend itself very well to interactive data work. I
| actually even tried to put together something similar myself over
| Christmas break as a PoC: https://github.com/demirev/radian
| nomilk wrote:
| Observations:
|
| - Easy to use (very little friction, although command + L to open
| chat could be nice, first time using I couldn't locate the chat
| pane, although the humility to have it tucked away was nice :) )
|
| - It generates and asks to run preliminary code e.g. str(object)
| to see what it's working with), wasn't expecting this, nice!
|
| - Has most (all?) the niceties cursor has slowly added over the
| months
|
| - Small thing, but I'd definitely prefer that when it generates
| code it places it in a script for me to read and run line by
| line, rather than showing the code in the chat pane and expecting
| the user to select between Run (all of it!) or Cancel. I'd
| generally never run unfamiliar code all at once, let alone LLM-
| generated code, but much rather read the code in the script pane
| where I can modify, comment, edit, and eventually run line by
| line.
|
| I've used cursor (in tandem with RStudio) a fair bit for R/shiny
| development. After half an hour playing with this, I'm pretty
| confident this is a better experience, one I'd prefer over
| cursor/RStudio. Well done.
| WillNickols wrote:
| Thanks for the comments! We're working on the shortcuts but
| that should come soon. If you edit the code in the conversation
| before you hit run, it'll actually let you modify it and then
| run that code when you hit Run. (Try "Generate 10 normals in
| the console" and then change it to 20 when it gives rnorm(10).)
|
| Can you say a bit more about what you mean with line-by-line
| running from a script? Would the script show up in the editor
| pane (top left) and then you'd run the script line by line and
| the AI would see the outputs from that code being run?
| nomilk wrote:
| I wouldn't expect the AI to see the output of the human
| running code line by line, but simply that when AI generates
| code, it places it in the script pane (just how cursor
| typically edits file(s) to place its generated code in the
| right places within those files).
|
| For quick and dirty EDA in R, the appropriate place is
| probably just going to be the bottom of the current script.
| For example here [0] Rao gives the requested code; rather
| than being presented with Run/Cancel options, I'd prefer an
| 'Accept' button that places the code at the end of the
| current script in the script pane so it can be read by the
| human and run a line at a time (to verify that it works each
| step of the way)
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/a/8x4Ykdt
| WillNickols wrote:
| Makes sense - we're planning to have "Rao rules"
| (essentially Cursor rules) out tomorrow, so you'll be able
| to include an instruction that it should always append to
| some file you have open. Hopefully it obeys that and then
| you can run the code from there.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Is the pricing paying for access to models, or is it expected
| that users must have their own subscriptions/API access to
| OpenAI/Anthropic/whichever model providers?
|
| If the former, is there a non-paid option for people to bring
| their own model access? If the latter, what is the subscription
| pricing paying for? I am in favor of subscriptions for on-going
| services/costs, but in the absence of on-going costs, I'd prefer
| a pay-once option.
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