I think Rao is more appealing to me since Positron already has that kind of integration, while RStudio doesn’t. Plus, Posit probably won’t ever add an AI Chat feature to RStudio anyway.

FWIW there's a bunch of stuff Erdos has that Positron doesn't (including having solved Positron's top 5 open GitHub issues):

1. Remote development via SSH or containers

2. AI that can connect to ChatGPT, local models, or our backend

3. In-line code execution for Qmd/Rmd files

4. Julia as a first class citizen

5. Multi-agent chats: as many AI sessions as you want and they’ll all run in parallel

6. Windows ARM64 builds

7. Open source AGPLv3 license

8. A bunch of other misc items including read-write data explorer for CSVs and TSVs, plots history sorted by file and time, searchable help, a command history tab, etc

Maybe the biggest difference going forward is that Positron was a ~2 year dev project, whereas Erdos reached feature parity (plus or minus some features) in about ~2 months and is now adding substantial brand new functionality every week.

Will, thanks for the explanation. This changes my view a lot. Will give it a try.