Appendix — Code and data

Data used in this book

All examples use benthic cover and fish survey data from the reefs of Kia, Solomon Islands, first published by Hamilton et al. 2017 (Hamilton et al. 2017). The data loads directly from a URL, so there’s nothing to download:

library(readr)

dat <- read_csv(url(
    "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cbrown5/example-ecological-data/refs/heads/main/data/benthic-reefs-and-fish/fish-coral-cover-sites.csv"
))

Key columns: pres.topa (counts of juvenile bumphead parrotfish), cb_cover (branching coral cover), soft_cover (soft coral cover), logged (whether the adjacent catchment was logged) and dist_to_logging_km.

Note the file uses lowercase cb_cover. Several examples in this book refer to it as CB_cover, so either rename the column after loading or adjust the prompt to match your data — a good reminder to check that an agent is using the column names your data actually has.

Supporting files in this repository

  • resources/DIY-stats-bot-system.md — the system prompt used for the DIY stats bot in Section 7.
  • .github/chatmodes/DIY-stats-bot.chatmode.md — the same prompt packaged as a VS Code custom chat mode.

Further reading