r-skills

Claude Code R Skills

Version 1.2.4 | Last updated: 2026-04-05

A curated collection of Claude Code configurations for modern R use. These skills, rules, commands, and agents help Claude Code understand R best practices and generate idiomatic, high-quality R code. Additionally the rules and commands help with efficient token usage and enforce constraints, and agents can perform specific tasks. Obviously you can fork and adapt any of these to your case-use.

I use Positron, but if you are a VSCode user there is also a plugin for R language server for code intelligence.

To try and pre-empt some of the issues with LLMs being reinforced to please the user, I've added a scientific reasoning principle to CLAUDE.md: we test hypotheses; we never prove them. Claude is instructed to reason from evidence, maintain healthy scepticism, quantify uncertainty explicitly (preferring Bayesian framing), and never tell the user what it thinks the user wants to hear at the expense of accuracy. This doesn't seem to prevent the "telling you what it thinks you want to hear" problem entirely, but is hopefully better than nothing.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Overview
• Understanding Feature Types
  • Skills
  • Commands
  • Rules
  • Agents
  • Hooks
  • Contexts
• Features
• Installation
  • Option 1: Plugin Marketplace
  • Option 2: Copy to your project
  • Option 3: Copy to user configuration
• Quick Reference
  • Essential Modern R Patterns
  • Key Anti-Patterns to Avoid
• Directory Structure
• Core Principles
• Recommended Workflow
• Requirements
• Environment Management
• Token Optimization
• License

Acknowledgments

This project uses and builds on the work of:

• Sarah Johnson's Modern R Development Guide - Original guide that formed the foundation for the R skills in this repository

• Jeremy Allen's Claude Skills Repo - Jeremy's Claude Skills mostly derived from Sarah's guide

• Affaan Mustafa's Everything Claude Code - Framework structure, rules, commands, and agents adapted for R development from Affan's Hackathon winning code

• Posit's testing-r-packages Skill - testthat Edition 3 patterns, test design principles, and comprehensive expectations reference incorporated into the tdd-workflow skill

• statzhero's tidy-r-skill - Join quality control patterns (relationship, na_matches, tidylog), NA-safe filtering with filter_out(), when_any()/when_all(), replace_when() for in-place conditional updates, and cli::cli_abort() structured error messages incorporated into the tidyverse-patterns and r-style-guide skills

• As an aside, I use Quarto in my workflow and use Posit's Quarto plugin which you can add with: /plugin marketplace add posit-dev/skills and then /plugin install quarto@posit-dev-skills.

Overview

This repository provides Claude Code configurations specifically for R users, combining:

• R-specific skills for modern tidyverse patterns, rlang, performance, OOP, and more
• Development workflow tools adapted from everything-claude-code
• Testing and quality rules for R development

Understanding Feature Types

Claude Code uses five official feature types to customise its behaviour for R development, plus a custom convention (Contexts) built on the CLI's --system-prompt flag. Each serves a distinct purpose in the development workflow.

Skills

What they are: Markdown documents containing domain knowledge, best practices, and coding patterns that Claude references when writing code. Skills are passive knowledge resources loaded into Claude's context when relevant.

When to use: Claude automatically activates skills based on the code you're working on. For example, when you're writing tidyverse code, the tidyverse-patterns skill provides guidance on modern pipes, joins, and grouping.