ellmer 0.4.0 includes important lifecycle updates, new Claude features (caching, file uploads, web tools), OpenAI improvements, and enhancements to error handling, pricing tracking, and security
The newest version of ellmer introduces a simpler `chat()` interface that can works with any provider, a bunch of improvements to tool calling, and a handful of smaller quality of life improvements
The newly released mcptools package makes coding assistants better at writing R code and applications built with ellmer more powerful
The first release of vitals, a package for large language model evaluation in R, just made it to CRAN
ellmer 0.2.0 lands with a swag of upgrades: Garrick Aden‑Buie joins the team, we make a couple of breaking changes, and add serious scale with `parallel_chat()` and `batch_chat()`. A new `params()` helper standardises model settings across providers and chats now report how much they cost. The release also tidies `chat_*` names, bumps default models and adds Hugging Face, Mistral AI, and Portkey connectors
We've been experimenting with LLM-powered tools to streamline R data science and package development
