About using LLMs to convert R codebases that rely on statistical library functions.
Has this happened?
Yes 53 (45%)Not sure 57 (48%)No 9 (8%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
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About using LLMs to convert R codebases that rely on statistical library functions.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Implementing statistical functions from scratch can be rather dangerous – can you trust the implementation is correct? You can have an implementation which works well for a few obvious tests, but then performs poorly for edge cases (e.g. due to excessive accumulation of rounding error). Whereas, good chance the existing R implementation of whatever has been reviewed by expert statisticians.
What the GP said. This would scare the hell out of me, and I probably do have the expertise to check this.
More generally though, the LLM won't see the code for the implementations, just the function calls so I'd be really impressed if it could do a good job here.