Executive Summary

• Shiny Assistant is extremely easy to use and offers user-friendly and inclusive features like swapping between Python and R (I only tested out R this round) and having the user choose ‘Concise’, ‘Code only’ or ‘Verbose’ option
  • I appreciated the explanations that came along with the results but really appreciate the recognized value in helping users just get to the code option (potentially useful for more advanced Shiny developers)
• The results seem to get better over time
  • After asking another repeat prompt again a few days later the result was more useful
• Shiny Assistant has saved me some valuable time in googling for solutions to my problems
• Shiny Assistant produced some very ‘beginner’ mistakes like using a duplicate ID in the UI - but the error messages are very clear and should guide even newer developers to a workable solution.
• Overall, I’ve been developing R Shiny apps since 2014 and I’m really excited about incorporating this tool into my workflow going forward to expedite my problem solving and generating some starter code when I have the natural language to describe my problem/solution.
  • I don’t think the goal of Shiny Assistant is to replace Shiny developers but rather to speed up development and help with idea generation!

Background

• I recently applied and got off the the waitlist for the Shiny Assistant beta program - It’s a chat assistant for building shiny apps!

• Currently, as a consultant I have been devoting some time to learning a few new things (to me) in Shiny and my development work includes:

  • Building a new demo featuring curated facility data from the Parks & Recreation department in my town
  • Reviving some older published shiny apps on shinyapp.io that require some migrations to newer packages (e.g. ‘rgdal’ to ‘sf’ and ‘keras’ to ‘keras3’.)

  I want to be very aware about how much time I spend on professional development hours, so I have been excited to try out Shiny Assistant to get some ‘straight to the point’ solutions to speed up some development time for these new Shiny projects.

Prompts

Create a simple shiny app using the 'bslib' framework, with 'page_navbar()' pages with a home landing page consisting of 'card()' functions?

• This was a very spot on result and mimicked my existing progress on this demo app.
  • Code
  • Pictures

Can you explain and provide an example of how to migrate from function like 'readOGR' from the deprecated 'rgdal' package to the new 'sf' package?

• This question was not posed as a shiny specific question although I did need the answer to this question to fix code in a Shiny app
• The result was very concise and worked great for re-working some older code!
  • Code / Pictures

Show me how to add a button that changes between different page_navbar() nav_panel() pages using the 'bslib' package?

• At first, a error message appeared indicating that the were duplicate ID’s and after renaming the second and third actionButton()’s the shiny app worked 🎉 My real-world demo that I’m working on only requires the first button to kickstart the process, so this solution works for me.
  • Code
  • Pictures