Developer Skills

Extension Development

These skills help you create new Tidymodels packages and contribute to the ecosystem. Each skill provides step-by-step guidance for building specific package components.

Installation

To use developer skills, first add the Tidymodels skills marketplace, then install the developer skills collection:

/plugin marketplace add tidymodels/skills
/plugin install tidymodels-developers@tidymodels-skills

See the Getting Started Guide for Claude Code installation and detailed setup instructions.

Available Skills

Create Custom Metrics

Build new performance metrics for evaluating model predictions with the yardstick package.

What you’ll learn:

  • Implementing metric functions with yardstick conventions
  • Creating class-specific and general implementations
  • Writing comprehensive tests
  • Documentation best practices

Create Preprocessing Steps

Develop custom preprocessing steps for feature engineering with the recipes package.

What you’ll learn:

  • Building step functions with recipes infrastructure
  • Implementing prep and bake methods
  • Handling tidy selection and roles
  • Testing preprocessing transformations

Create Tuning Parameters

Define custom hyperparameter objects for model tuning with the dials package.

What you’ll learn:

  • Creating quantitative and qualitative parameters
  • Implementing data-dependent ranges and finalization
  • Using transformations for better grid coverage
  • Integration with tune workflows

Prerequisites

Before using developer skills, ensure you have:

  • R 4.1.0 or higher
  • Development tools (Rtools, Xcode CLI, or r-base-dev)
  • Required packages: devtools, usethis, testthat, roxygen2

See the Getting Started Guide for detailed setup instructions.

Workflow

  1. Choose a skill based on what you want to build
  2. Start Claude Code with the skill file
  3. Describe your goal - be specific about the functionality
  4. Iterate with Claude Code to refine the implementation
  5. Review and test the generated code
  6. Document your new package component

Shared Resources

All developer skills reference common patterns and workflows:

  • Extension Prerequisites: Package setup and structure
  • Development Workflow: Fast iteration cycle with devtools
  • Testing Patterns: Writing effective tests for extensions
  • Documentation Standards: roxygen2 and pkgdown conventions

These shared references are automatically included when you load a skill.