Positron Assistant

Preview feature

This feature is in preview. Preview features are unsupported and may face breaking changes in a future release. Any issues found in the feature will be addressed during the regular release schedule; they will not result in immediate patches or hotfixes.

We encourage customers to try these features and we welcome any feedback via Posit Support, but we recommend that the feature not be used in production until it is in general availability (i.e., officially released as a full feature). To provide feedback, please email your Posit Customer Success representative or sales@posit.co and specify that you are trialing this feature.

Positron Assistant is an AI coding assistant built specifically for data science workflows. It helps you write code, debug issues, explain code snippets, and work more efficiently with R and Python.

Enabling or disabling Positron Assistant

Positron Assistant is an opt-in feature. Administrators can control whether it is enabled using Enforced Settings, but if your administrator has not enforced a setting, you can enable or disable it yourself.

To change this setting, search for positron.assistant.enable in the settings editor and check or uncheck the box.

Starting a session with managed credentials

Note

Before you can use Amazon Bedrock or Snowflake Cortex, your administrator must configure:

For Amazon Bedrock: AWS managed credentials and access to Amazon Bedrock
For Snowflake Cortex: Snowflake managed credentials and access to Snowflake Cortex

If you are unsure whether these are configured, contact your administrator or see the Positron Assistant section of the Administration Guide.

When using Positron Pro sessions on Posit Workbench, you can take advantage of managed credentials for enterprise language model providers. This provides seamless authentication that is automatically configured when you start your session, eliminating the need to manually set up API keys or credentials.

To start a Positron Pro session with managed credentials:

Navigate to the Posit Workbench home page
In the New Session dialog, locate the Session Credentials section
Sign in to your AWS or Snowflake account
Start your Positron Pro session

Once your session starts, Positron Assistant will automatically have access to the language model provider through your managed credentials and will refresh your credentials periodically.

See the Positron Assistant Chat documentation to get started with the chat pane.