R Package Skills 
AI agents don't know every R package. When they encounter unfamiliar ones, they hallucinate APIs or fall back to verbose base R.
This plugin teaches them.
Generate a skill from any R package:
/r-package-skill collapse
Pulls documentation from CRAN, extracts patterns, writes a skill file. Your agent now knows when to use collapse, which functions matter, and how they compose.
Works for any package—CRAN, GitHub, internal tools. Each skill is tested, graded, and optimized before deployment.
Installation
Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add arthurgailes/r-package-skills
/plugin install r-package-skills@r-package-skills
Codex
Fetch and follow instructions from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arthurgailes/r-package-skills/main/.codex/INSTALL.md
OpenCode
Fetch and follow instructions from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arthurgailes/r-package-skills/main/.opencode/INSTALL.md
Quick Start
Generate your first skill:
/r-package-skill data.table
You'll be asked where to install (Personal, Project, or Custom path). Then the agent:
- Pulls CRAN reference manual and vignettes
- Runs baseline test without the skill
- Writes minimal
SKILL.mdaddressing failures - Iterates until tests pass (90%+ score)
Takes 10-12 minutes with 3-4 approval prompts. Skill appears at your chosen path, ready to use.
Philosophy: What Gets Included
This plugin focuses on newer and lesser-known R packages — not the popular ones AI models already know well.
For example:
- dplyr is excellent, but GPTs have thousands of training examples. No skill needed.
- collapse (fast grouped operations) is powerful but newer. GPTs hallucinate its API without a skill.
- ellmer (multi-provider LLM chat) shipped in 2024. GPTs have minimal references.
The goal: fill knowledge gaps, not duplicate existing training. We include packages where agents consistently struggle or hallucinate without guidance.
You decide what matters. Use /r-package-skill to generate skills for:
- Internal packages your team built
- Niche CRAN packages in your domain
- GitHub packages not on CRAN
- New packages (< 2 years old) with limited documentation
We won't ship 1,000 packages — just curated skills for packages that demonstrate the pattern and solve common problems. The generator is the real product; the included skills are examples and starting points.
Included Skills
Skill Generators
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
| r-package-skill | Generate a skill from any R package documentation |
Package Skills
Meta-Skills (Multi-Package Integration)
| Skill | Focus |
|---|---|
| r-ai | R AI ecosystem navigation and integration patterns |
| r-mapping | R mapping workflow guidance (freestiler + mapgl) |
R AI Packages
| Skill | Focus |
|---|---|
| r-ellmer | Chat with LLMs, multi-provider support (hub package) |
| r-btw | Provide R context (docs, data) to LLMs |
| r-mcptools | Let AI agents execute R code in live sessions |
| r-ragnar | RAG workflows, vector stores, document search |
| r-vitals | LLM output evaluation and quality testing |
Data & Performance
| Skill | Focus |
|---|---|
| r-collapse | Fast grouped/weighted stats, panel data transformations |
| r-duckplyr | Lazy evaluation for large datasets with DuckDB backend |