Dear Posit Cloud and R-Studio community,
As a university faculty, I would like to file here a feature request that I have been dreaming of. In fact, what I am proposing is one of the simplest possible features, but one that that I think would be a game-changer feature for educators. I would love to have, both in R-Studio IDE offline and in R-Studio on Posit Cloud, the ability to save the history of changes made to source code files.
I am not talking about saving the history of executed commands, which has always been possible. I am also not talking about code version control using e.g. GitHub. This also has been possible for a while. I am proposing having a way of saving the history of changes made to each source file either every X seconds (like version history on Google Docs), or even every single change (like with VS Code Recorder extension). Then, please make such code history be stored into a sharable file.
Why would that be a game changer? Well, easy: we could recreate both our own and others' steps while coding. This helps both showcasing to others how we code, what is our coding process, but also it would strongly help educators prevent students from simply using ChatGPT or similar Large Language Models to generate code for them. We would be able to inspect the actual process of coding performed by students in a given assignment.
This is such an easy feature to implement. Please, consider doing so. We live in an era when having such tools will become essential.