fwiw Chat-GPT 4 (paid) is a major upgrade on this front, I found the free version worse than useless for R and the paid version capable of tons of things.

Interesting. I am paying for it, but just tried to update a code for like 30min and it kept giving me the wrong thing over and over (super frustrating), that I just ended piecing the thing together with google.

I paid for 4 to use 2/ R for a couple months, but did not have as much success with complex tasks as hoped. But this was awhile ago, and it feels like they degraded 3.5 since then, because it is also not as useful for me lately. I can only consistently use 3.5 to debug & for small code blocks