Two things I started doing this past week: short term consulting and vibe coding.

Both are going better than expected.

This week I quietly started offering consulting sessions — 30 minutes to an hour of my time. We have a conversation, I ask questions, offer reframes, bring in ideas from outside whatever lane you’re working in. That’s basically it. I wasn’t sure how useful that format would be. Turns out: pretty useful.

Three conversations this week. One with a large environmental NGO trying to integrate environmental justice into actual technical on-the-ground practice — not as a messaging layer, but into the methodology itself. One with a small community development group in rural Oklahoma working through social media strategy to revitalize a community theatre. One with a NYC-based institute building a research model around what they’re calling nexi — the complex interfaces between natural and cultural systems.

Three different scales, three different problems. The through-line in all of them: most hard problems in this space aren’t unsolved, they’re just framed wrong. Shift the frame, and things start moving.

What I’m offering is pretty simple: I have an unusual background and I’ve spent a long time building expertise across things that don’t usually talk to each other. Engineering and filmmaking. Water policy and expedition work. Indigenous advocacy and media strategy. Academic research and field practice. AI integration and environmental storytelling. That breadth is either a liability or an asset, depending on the problem — and for a certain kind of problem, it’s exactly what’s missing from the room.

The people I can be most useful to: organizations trying to figure out how to actually operationalize values they already hold. Filmmakers and researchers trying to reach audiences they’re not currently reaching. Teams working at the intersection of environment, culture, and technology who feel like their disciplines aren’t talking to each other. People at a decision point who need someone to think out loud with — not a coach, not a therapist, just someone with relevant pattern recognition who will be direct with you.

All three conversations this week were genuinely generative. I’ll keep doing this.

Next week I’m talking with filmmakers and a nonprofit about integrating AI into their workflows — something we’ve been building at NativesOutdoors for a while now and something I think is quietly transforming what small teams can produce.

Sessions are 1) 30 min / $150, 2) 60 min / $275, and organizational engagements at $500. Link below. If cost is a barrier, reach out before booking.

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And then there’s this other thing I’m doing that feels completely nuts.

I built a mobile app for expedition documentary filmmakers. I’ve never shipped an app before. I built it anyway. It’s currently in beta with real testers. Here’s an early website version you can look at now — the newer one has a few more features.

The way I built it is worth explaining. There’s a term going around right now — “vibe coding” — which basically means using AI to build software by describing what you want in plain language and letting it write the code for you. You’re not typing code, you’re having a conversation. The AI builds, you react, you iterate. That’s what I did.

Here’s what the app does: expedition filmmaking has a logistical layer that most planning tools completely ignore — you’re managing power systems, camera equipment, satellite comms, and crew needs in places with no infrastructure, often for weeks at a time. The app lets you build out a full expedition power budget, model your equipment load against your power generation and storage capacity, and figure out where your plan breaks before you’re in the field and it breaks for you. Built specifically for how documentary crews actually work: under-resourced, overloaded, making critical decisions fast.

I went to Carnegie Mellon for my PhD and was exposed to early machine learning and LLMs back in the early 2010s, so this space isn’t new to me. I’ve done some coding before. But that’s not really why this worked. I just asked Claude to guide me through the process and it did. That’s kind of the whole point.

I’ll be writing more about this experience — what it actually feels like to build something when you’re not a software engineer, what that process reveals about where these tools are headed, and what it means for people doing field-based creative work. More soon.