post pub. Sep 5, 2026
Hadley Wickham's write-up of a useR! 2025 talk covering three practical LLM use cases in R with the ellmer package: extracting unstructured data (text, images) into structured rectangles, tool calling to give LLMs read/write access to the world (and how that composes into agents), and where LLMs give clear coding wins (translation between languages/formats, and lowering the activation energy to try things). Also covers common LLM failure modes (letter counting, arithmetic) and concerns around cost, environment, privacy, and concentration of power.