AI for data science

Tidy design principles is now AI for data science

I’ve changed the name of this newsletter from “tidy design principles” (which has not made sense for some time) to AI for data science.

Oct 20 • Hadley Wickham

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September 2026

A no bullshit guide to LLMs

A talk from useR! 2025

Sep 5 • Hadley Wickham

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August 2026

AI outside of work

I’m going on vacation for the next two weeks, so I thought it might be fun to share some of my non-work uses of AI.

Aug 14 • Hadley Wickham

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Illustrating my slides with AI

You might have noticed my slide illustrations in my last substack. This week I talk about how I made them: using AI, supported by an R package that…

Aug 3 • Hadley Wickham

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July 2026

y code when ai?

A talk on AI and coding

Jul 24 • Hadley Wickham

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Auto mode knows it's dangerous (and does it anyway)

Ask a coding agent to run a curl-pipe-sh install command and it will — even if it notices the danger. I assumed auto mode with a sandbox would protect…

Jul 10 • Hadley Wickham

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Help! My coding agent can run code

A coding agent is only actually useful if it can run whatever code the task demands, but a tool that runs arbitrary code is just as dangerous as it…

Jul 2 • Hadley Wickham

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June 2026

A coding agent is six functions in a trenchcoat

Coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex have taken the software engineering field by storm. What makes them tick?

Jun 19 • Hadley Wickham

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Your LLM can’t math (and that’s ok)

Last week we precisely defined an agent: an LLM, in a harness, that calls tools repeatedly in a loop. This week we'll fix a few deliberate…

Jun 12 • Hadley Wickham

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What is an agent?

Conversations, turns, rounds, tools, agents and more!

Jun 5 • Hadley Wickham

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May 2026

Returning to life!

Welcome back to the tidy design principles substack.

May 18 • Hadley Wickham

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October 2023

Strategies

Exposing different ways to tackle a problem in a user friendly way.

Oct 27, 2023 • Hadley Wickham

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