EARL Conference.

Colin Gillespie

Chief Technology Officer, Jumping Rivers

Navigating Package Updates with AI

Diffify (diffify.com) provides instant, structured comparisons between any two versions of an R package on CRAN or a Python package on PyPI, surfacing changes to functions, arguments, dependencies, and namespace. Building on this tool, we introduce a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server built around Diffify, which brings these package comparison capabilities directly into the coding assistant workflow. Rather than context-switching to a browser, data scientists can query Diffify data from within their IDE, enabling faster, more informed decisions about package updates without leaving their development environment.