June 24, 2026
Package panic hits R
Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions
R’s package pile-up has coders blaming bad teaching, AI slop, and total chaos
TLDR: A veteran R observer says the public package library is being swamped by new uploads, many with little or no explanation of what they do. In the comments, people are blaming everything from lazy teaching habits to AI-style “slop,” turning a quality-control gripe into a full community roast.
A long-running watcher of CRAN — the giant public library where people upload add-ons for the R programming language — says the floodgates are open. What used to be a fun monthly hunt through around a hundred new packages has turned into a hamster-wheel nightmare, with 323 new packages in a single month. The sharpest complaint? A lot of these uploads don’t seem especially useful, and some barely explain themselves at all. In May alone, 40 packages had no README, no tutorial, and no link to a code page. Ouch.
But the comments are where this story really catches fire. One camp says the real villain is modern teaching: critics are dragging the tidyverse teaching style for encouraging people to solve every problem by importing “just one more package” instead of learning the basics already built in. Another commenter basically blamed the whole mess on “vibe coding hell,” which is about as subtle as throwing a chair through a window. And then came the truly grim nickname: “R slop.” Yes, the community went there.
Not everyone is just screaming into the void, though. One commenter floated a “web of trust” system where trusted people vouch for packages and low-confidence submissions get shut down fast. So the mood is a mix of panic, snark, and dark comedy: is this healthy growth, or has R entered its quantity-over-quality era? Either way, the community sounds very, very done.
Key Points
- •The author says the volume of new CRAN packages has increased sharply, making manual curation of a monthly “Top 40” list much harder than before.
- •The article suggests one possible reason for the increase is that packaging code and submitting software has become easier.
- •To compare the trend, the article references a Financial Times chart by John Burn-Murdoch based on NBER research about rapid app growth.
- •The article questions whether most new R packages provide meaningful benefits such as new statistical methods, new application areas, or high-performance code.
- •As an indicator of quality, the article reports that in May, 40 of 323 new CRAN packages lacked a README, vignettes, and a repository URL.