Intro to Posit Assistant

Posit Assistant (PA)

• https://assistant.posit.co/
• An AI agent geared towards the needs of data scientists
• Works in Positron and RStudio
• Connects to your live R and Python sessions

Sign in to a provider

Is this thing on?

All the things you will confuse Posit Assistant with

• Posit Assistant supersedes:
  • Positron Assistant, superseded now, going away Q4 2026.
  • Databot, deprecated July 2026.
  • A brief and biased history of Posit data science agents, June 2026 blog post by Joe Cheng
• Posit Assistant can be used with many providers
  • Posit AI Pass is one of the supported providers
  • Posit AI Pass lets you access many models through one subscription service
  • Posit AI Pass was previously known as Posit AI (no pass)

Choose from your provider’s models

/clear early, /clear often

• /clear begins a new conversation
• All the usual benefits of turning the thing off and back on again

Conversations are not lost

• Don’t worry: you can get back to earlier conversations!
  • To read
  • To resume

Implicit context is usually “enough”

• Posit Assistant knows, e.g.:
  • Which files you have open
  • Which file is active
  • Your current selection
  • The current workspace/folder
• You rarely need to explicitly attach a file as context
• But there are ways to explicitly attach content:
  • Chat Features: File Attachments

Special two-way relationship with R console

• PA sees and can drive the R session in your console

Your turn

• Experiment to probe how much PA knows about, e.g., the file you are looking at or your current selection
• Define a couple R objects then ask PA about them
• Prompt PA to create an R object and to mutate it
• Ask PA about itself or Positron to probe its self-knowledge