323 new R packages in one month — and 40 shipped with no README
A long-running CRAN curation project hits a wall: the monthly intake has grown so fast that sorting signal from noise has become a part-time job, and a chunk of submissions arrive with no docs at all.
In May, 323 new packages landed on CRAN; 40 of them had no README, vignette, or repository URL. The curator behind the 'Top 40' roundup says the work is now exponentially harder.
The thread splits on the cause. Some blame AI-generated 'slop' and tidyverse over-reliance; a recent first-time submitter pushes back, noting CRAN still put his package through two rounds of human review.
The package firehose hits a human bottleneck
Joseph Rickert — formerly of Revolution Analytics and RStudio/Posit — uses his rworks.dev post to report a number from inside CRAN's intake: 323 new packages arrived in May alone, and 40 of those came with no README, no vignette, and no repository URL. CRAN, which he calls 'the most accessible repository for statistical knowledge on the planet,' has made it 'too easy to package up some code and ship.'
The pain is concrete and personal: his long-running 'Top 40' curation roundup, which sifts each month's submissions for the ones worth knowing about, has become exponentially more labor-intensive. He ties the surge to the broader pattern of app proliferation in the agentic-AI era, citing an FT chart on release volume.
The thread argues over whether it's slop or just scale
The blunt diagnosis came fast, and so did the pushback against it.
"vibe coding hell is the reason" — a commenter
A recent submitter offered the inside counter-data point.
"I'm a recent first-time CRAN submitter… my package went through 2 rounds of human review. I doubt R has a severe 'too much AI slop' problem relative to other languages." — a first-time CRAN submitter
Others relocated the blame from AI to pedagogy, arguing the ecosystem trains import-everything habits.
"an over reliance among R instructors on the tidyverse, an ever-expanding ecosystem of redundant functions and anti-patterns… skipping over teaching them how to use the already powerful and intuitive base packages." — a commenter on R teaching
A more structural take questioned whether CRAN should be a dumping ground at all.
"If you're making a package for a small team or aren't pushing it to a large audience then just keep it on a GitHub repository." — a commenter proposing GitHub as the default
And one observer reframed the whole panic as overdue, not novel.
"The surprising thing to me is that it's taken as long as it has for CRAN to have this problem. As others have said, this is happening everywhere." — a commenter on the broader trend
If the submitter who passed two human reviews is right, the crisis isn't bad packages slipping through — it's that the volunteers doing the reviewing are the scarce resource, and there's no AI-era version of more of them.
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