Between Positron Assistant, Databot, ellmer, chatlas, and their offshoots, there’s been a lot of LLM-related news coming out of Posit in 2025. Many folks across the organization felt that it was hard to keep up with new developments in the space, both internally and in the wider world. With this in mind, my colleague Sara Altman and I started working on an internal newsletter in June; released every two weeks, we’d give the most concise possible synopsis of movements within the company as well as the news from the wider space that we were paying the closest attention to.
Of course, if Positeers themselves found it difficult to keep up, even despite shared meetings and Slack channels, the Posit community likely felt even more out of the loop. After a couple months of figuring out our voice and workflow, we started publishing the newsletter publicly as the AI Newsletter on the Posit Blog. We’re now a few editions in—if you’d like to give it a look, check it out here.
Behind the curtains
Often, the first reaction I get when telling folks about the newsletter is, jokingly(?), “So do you just have an LLM write it?” Hopefully, if you read the newsletter, you’ll realize quickly that that’s not the case. In case you’re curious, though, our workflow looks something like this:
- Steep in way too much AI/LLM news. At least speaking for myself, I take an hour or so each day to read about developments in the wider space. I also work on AI-related R packages through most of my day, which helps me interpret that news more critically in light of my own experiences trying out new tools and models. Throughout, I keep a list of bullet points of things I think might be relevant.
- The Tuesday before the newsletter comes out (on Fridays), I paste the list of bullet points into a shared Google Doc and jot notes on the news I find to be the most important while Sara does the same. Often, I cross-reference against relevant Slack channels to make sure we’re highlighting stuff from inside of the company but outside of my happy silo.
- The next day, Wednesday, Sara cuts and refines and rewrites and out comes a finished blog post. Sometimes, I move a couple words here and there.
- At the end of the day on Wednesday, we hand the post off to Isabella Velásquez, who situates it on the Posit Blog and prepares social media posts to head out on Friday morning.
Sara and Isabella make a rock-star team, and I’m very grateful to work with both of them.