Hey HN! We’re Jorge and Will from Lotas (https://www.lotas.ai/), and we’ve built Erdos, a secure AI-powered data science IDE that’s fully open source (https://www.lotas.ai/erdos).

A few months ago, we shared Rao, an AI coding assistant for RStudio (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44638510). We built Rao to bring the Cursor-like experience to RStudio users. Now we want to take the next step and deliver a tool for the entire data science community that handles Python, R, SQL, and Julia workflows.

Erdos is a fork of VS Code designed for data science. It includes:

- An AI that can search, read, and write across all file types for Python, R, SQL, and Julia. Also, for Jupyter notebooks, we’ve optimized a jupytext system to allow the AI to make faster edits.

- Built-in Python, R, and Julia consoles accessible to both the user and AI

- Plot pane that tracks and organizes plots by file and time

- Database pane for connecting to and manipulating SQL or FTP data sources

- Environment pane for viewing variables, packages, and environments

- Help pane for Python, R, and Julia documentation

- Remote development via SSH or containers

- AI assistant available through a single-click sign-in to our zero data retention backend, bring your own key, or a local model

- Open source AGPLv3 license

We built Erdos because data scientists are often second-class citizens in modern IDEs. Tools like VS Code, Cursor, and Claude Code are made for software developers, not for people working across Jupyter notebooks, scripts, and SQL. We wanted an IDE that feels native to data scientists, while offering the same AI productivity boosts.

You can try Erdos at https://www.lotas.ai/erdos, check out our source code on our GitHub (https://github.com/lotas-ai/erdos), and let us know what features would make it more useful for your work. We’d love your feedback below!

This is a good idea, although IMO source control, compute, and MLOps integration are bigger but less flashy pain points for data scientists than AI in notebooks.

If you're going to market Erdos as open source, then IMO there should be a github link somewhere on your website.

Very cool. Any plans to add support for local models? This has what has prevented us from adopting Positron so far. We have sensitive data and sending to third party APIs is not an option (regardless of their stated retention policies).

Looks interesting but i'm unclear what makes it "more accurate"?

Give me this, but with a very efficient, opinionated path to put models into production. Give me accessible PM and customer friendly documentation about features and model choices at every stage. Make it reusable and easy to modify. Make it robust and scalable at inference time, with metrics and dashboards tracking performance over time. This seems like optimising the bit that's already fun, but I see a lot of value in hand-holding a department through all the stodgy boring bits and getting high quality analysis repeatably into customer hands.

This looks very cool, I’m gonna try it later today.

Out of curiosity, why the name Erdos? AFAIK Erdos was neither a statistician, data scientist nor AI researcher.

He sure solved many probability/combinatorics problems and famously had many many collaborators.

I can't tell how this differs to Cursor from your website. How is it different?

Have you done any fine-tuning or prompt-customization for the R-specific work? I've found the models worse on R when compared to Python, especially for more complex tasks. This looks cool, thanks for sharing!

Apple Silicon only, might be worth mentioning on the download link.

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.

Do you have the option to run on a local model? Lots of firms don't want data or prompts going outside the local network

Does it support OpenRouter? I tried configuring OpenRouter as a "local model" but it seems to silently fail.

We started with a product like this at Definite (https://www.definite.app/), but it became clear there weren't enough people willing to spend real money on a product like it when Cursor / VS Code already have good coverage on data science.

I see Google acquiring Iotas in the future, that's how good it gets

The choice of name seems pretty bizarre. The famous Erdos [1] was a mathematician, not data scientist, computer scientist, or statistician.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s