R Observatory: Metrics for btw version 1.5.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

btw

1.5.0Package record

A Toolkit for Connecting R and Large Language Models

0packages depend

14.3Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Garrick Aden-BuieCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗Declared funder: Posit Software, PBC

A complete toolkit for connecting 'R' environments with Large Language Models (LLMs). Provides utilities for describing 'R' objects, package documentation, and workspace state in plain text formats optimized for LLM consumption. Supports multiple workflows: interactive copy-paste to external chat interfaces, programmatic tool registration with 'ellmer' chat clients, batteries-included chat applications via 'shinychat', and exposure to external coding agents through the Model Context Protocol. Project configuration files enable stable, repeatable conversations with project-specific context and preferred LLM settings.

Changes in 1.5.0

New features

Added btw cran versions <packages...> to look up CRAN release dates and versions, and versioned NEWS through btw(), btw_this(), the btw docs tools, and btw docs news. Use btw("@news dplyr v1.1.4") to paste a specific release's NEWS into a chat, or btw("@news dplyr") for the full file (#213).
btw docs and btw pkg src commands now auto-load an in-development package found in the current directory (or its pkg-r/, R/ subfolder) with pkgload::load_all() before running, so results reflect uncommitted local changes. Pass --no-dev to disable this and use the installed package instead (#212).
btw now supports shinychat >= 0.5.0 (#215):
btw_app() uses shinychat's new page_chat() layout, with the tool selection menu and the system prompt editor in offcanvas panels. When shinychat 0.4.x is installed, btw_app() falls back to the legacy sidebar layout and warns, suggesting you upgrade to shinychat 0.5.0.
Conversations are kept in a chat history. Past chats appear in the app's history drawer, so you can revisit a previous conversation at any time. When duckdb is installed, btw stores this history in a shared database in btw's user cache directory, with one history per project, so your chats are still there the next time you open the app in the same project. Without duckdb, conversations are not saved between sessions. btw prints a note that suggests installing duckdb.
btw's @ commands are also available as /btw-* slash commands, e.g. /btw-help dplyr::across, /btw-news dplyr v1.1.4, or /btw-url https://example.com. A slash command stages its context as an attachment on the chat input and shows a toast while it runs. Nothing is sent to the model until you submit your next message. If a command fails, btw_app() restores your input text and shows an error toast.
Skills are registered as slash commands under their own names, e.g. /skill-creator. Running a skill submits its instructions with your message to the model.
/new and /clear start a new chat. If chat history is enabled, btw_app() first saves the current conversation with shinychat's history-aware chat$new_chat() (posit-dev/shinychat#399), so the conversation isn't dropped from the history. The token and cost counters follow the active conversation and restore their totals when you load an old chat from the history.
Subagent reports use shinychat 0.5.0's HTML display protocol (contents_html()), with the full subagent conversation in a styled disclosure. btw_app() escapes untrusted markdown in subagent reports and in error toasts.
Tool results survive shinychat's conversation history serialization, so chats with tool results can be saved and restored. btw collapses multi-element character values to a single string, returns data frame results as JSON, and drops unserializable objects from run-R results.
Two new functions make the skill features reusable outside btw_app(). btw_skill_prompt() renders a skill's <skill> block, including its name, description, location, and optional compatibility and allowed-tools metadata. btw_skills_register_slash_commands() registers skills as slash commands on any shinychat chat_server().

Show all changes in 1.5.0Hide the rest of the changes in 1.5.0

Bug fixes

btw --version now works without a subcommand. Previously, Rapp's required top-level switch caused the CLI to print usage and exit before the version flag was ever checked.

Other changes

Local conversation history and project code-search indexes now use RSQLite, replacing DuckDB. Persistent data is stored in btw's user cache and separated by project; install RSQLite to enable this storage.
btw now requires ellmer (>= 0.4.2). The set_model() compatibility shim was removed, and client_get_models() now delegates to ellmer's models_list() generic, replacing a bespoke per-provider dispatch table (#214).
btw no longer reads the legacy user skills directory used by btw <= 1.2.0 (skills/ under tools::R_user_dir("btw", "config")) (#204).

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("btw", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("posit-dev/btw")

Development version from posit-dev/btw. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-btw

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-btw

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-btw

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed). We list this channel from recorded autoCRAN download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 6.3 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-09-29
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-09-25
OK13 OK2026-09-11
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-09-09
OK13 OK2026-09-04

Show 12 earlier changesHide 12 earlier changes

ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-08-06
OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-07-04
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-07-03
OK13 OK2026-06-11
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-06-08
OK13 OK2026-06-06
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-06-05
OK13 OK2026-05-24
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-05-14
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 1.5.0

READMEYes · 402 wordsVignettesNoNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 1.5.0Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 58 (2 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 93%37 run in a plain check (16 of them under a condition) · 1 never run · 2 hold no code
Exported functions with examples: 70%
Documented parameters: 98%
Return-value docs: 98%
Help pages citing references: 0%

How these are measured

Downloads

14.3K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #3,061 · ~39/day · ~1.2K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

1.6K30 days

4.2K90 days

14.3K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on475 r2u18 autocran

How downloads are counted

Repository

posit-dev/btw ↗Organization: posit-dev

141Stars

12Forks

20Open issues

4Open PRs

7Releases

998Commits

6Commit identities

aiai-agent-toolsellmerllmllm-toolsrstatsrstats-package

998 commits · Last activity 2026-10-06 · +2.9% stars, 30d · Default branch at 1.5.0.9000, ahead of CRAN 1.5.0 (checked 2026-10-11)

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 98%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 7
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Stars over time

2025-10-17 · 672026-10-11 · 141

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

15 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 8 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/posit-dev/btw on 2026-10-11.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

The R CMD check workflow runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and on R-devel

Governance and community (3)

Code of conductContributing guideSupport guide

Docs source (4)

README.Rmdpkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-10-06 · The repository has a site deploy workflow

pkgdown site last built 2026-09-09

Coverage (2)

Coverage reporting (Codecov).covrignore

Show all practicesHide 4 practices

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

data-raw/

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

For agents and models (1)

Agent skills

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

AI coding toolsBeta

This repository shows signs of AI coding tools.

Claude Codefirst seen 2025-10-15
Named in .Rbuildignore: .claude
Named in .gitignore: .claude, .claude/skills
Commits: at least 5 crediting it in the message
GitHub Copilotfirst seen 2025-12-08
Pull request: opened by its own account
Commits: 1 by its own account
Gemini CLIfirst seen on or before 2026-07-18
Config: a file or ignore line, not recorded which

Shared conventions any agent may read, so they name no particular tool.

Seen in the repository: AGENTS.md

Counts are commits, not lines of code. Commits by a tool's accounts count once across all of its accounts. Commits crediting it are the largest count among its credit lines, a minimum.How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (updated 2026-09-27)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

48 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing btw adds 70 packages (41 with compiled code, 53 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: stringi 11 MB, bslib 5.6 MB, promises 3.1 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 4.2.0

Imports (22)

brio cli clipr commonmark dplyr ellmer frontmatter fs jsonlite lifecyclemethodsmcptools pkgsearch rlang rmarkdown rstudioapi S7 sessioninfo skimrutilswithr xml2

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (28)

bslib callr chromote covr curl DBI desc devtools diffviewer evaluate fansi gert gh htmltools pandoc pkgload processx ragg R6 Rapp renv roxygen2 RSQLite shiny shinychat testthat tibble usethis

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (7)

Garrick Aden-Buie

Author, Maintainer since 1.0.0 (2025)

Joe Cheng

Author

Simon Couch

Author

Google

Copyright holder

Material Design Icons

Jamie Perkins

Copyright holder

countUp.js author

Microsoft

Copyright holder · added in 1.1.0

@vscode/codicons

Posit Software, PBC

Copyright holder, Funder

Releases (7)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

1.5.0Latest
record
2026-09-09 · current release · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
btw_skill_prompt, btw_skills_register_slash_commands, btw_tool_cran_versions
1.4.0
record
2026-08-05 · diff ↗
1.3.0
record
2026-07-02 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
btw_skill_install_project, btw_tool_files_patch
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.2.1
record
2026-03-23 · diff ↗
1.2.0
record
2026-03-16 · diff ↗ ·
added 20 exports
btw_agent_tool, btw_skill_install_github, btw_skill_install_package, btw_task, btw_task_create_skill, btw_tool_agent_subagent, btw_tool_cran_package, btw_tool_cran_search, btw_tool_files_edit, btw_tool_files_list, btw_tool_files_read, btw_tool_files_replace, btw_tool_files_search, btw_tool_files_write, btw_tool_pkg_load_all, btw_tool_sessioninfo_is_package_installed, btw_tool_sessioninfo_package, btw_tool_sessioninfo_platform, btw_tool_skill, install_btw_cli
1.1.0
record
2025-12-23 · diff ↗ ·
added 5 exports
btw_tool_pkg_check, btw_tool_pkg_coverage, btw_tool_pkg_document, btw_tool_pkg_test, btw_tool_run_r
1.0.0
record
2025-11-04
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11

Package metadata

First published: 2025-11-04
Total releases: 7 / 1 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 4.2.0
Download size: 905 KB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("btw")

Format

Aden-Buie, G., Google, Jamie Perkins, Microsoft, Posit Software, PBC, Cheng, J., & Couch, S. (2026). btw: A Toolkit for Connecting R and Large Language Models (Version 1.5.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.btw

This package has no citation file, so citation() returns this entry built from DESCRIPTION.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for btw version 1.5.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-19. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-19, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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