Posit's gander gets a second wind on X as an in-IDE AI assistant that reads your R environment, not just your file

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A post on August 21 describing gander, an R package that puts AI directly in RStudio and Positron, drew 12,119 views and 246 likes. gander is built on Posit's ellmer package and its distinguishing feature is that it feeds the model actual context about objects in your R environment, column names, types and distributions, rather than only the surrounding source lines. It supports Anthropic, Bedrock, Azure, Databricks, Gemini, OpenAI, Snowflake and some self-hosted models. Released by Posit in April 2026, so the spike is attention, not news.