Agentic Coding for GIS People

Agentic Coding for GIS People with Ujaval Gandhi

What can you actually do with AI coding agents if you're a GIS professional who doesn't write code? And where do you start?

Ujaval Gandhi spent 15 years at Google working on Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Earth Engine. Today he runs Spatial Thoughts, where he makes open learning material that helps people pick up modern geospatial tools. We recorded this conversation in person at the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum 2026 in Snowbird, after meeting in the hallway and talking about his in-depth tutorial on agentic coding for geospatial practitioners.

In this episode we cover:

- What agentic coding is, and how a coding agent differs from copy-pasting code out of a chatbot

- What a "harness" is (tools like Claude Code and Codex), and why running in a terminal with access to your files matters for GIS work

- Setting ground rules with an agents.md or claude.md file so your agent uses trusted tools like GeoPandas, Xarray and rioxarray instead of making things up

- How agents can check their own work by making maps, looking at them, and spotting problems like a wrong projection

- Using "plan mode" to work through a problem with the agent, such as choosing a hotspot analysis method and its settings, before anything gets built

- Running sensitivity analyses because trying different settings is now fast and cheap

- Pulling in web services, databases, and basemaps alongside your local files

- Connecting agents to QGIS through MCP (Model Context Protocol), and letting the agent install things for you

- Are AI agents good cartographers? Computer use, taste, and where map-making is heading

- Being more ambitious: taking on hard problems like SAR processing and data fusion that used to feel out of reach

- Will software interfaces go away, or will every tool add an interface built for agents?

- The big question: what is our job now? Outsourcing the work vs. outsourcing the understanding

- Should newcomers still learn Python? (Yes, but being able to read code matters more than writing it)

- Choosing models, and deciding which parts of your work you should never outsource

Spatial Thoughts: https://spatialthoughts.com
Ujaval's agentic coding tutorial for geospatial practitioners: https://courses.spatialthoughts.com/agentic-coding-geospatial.html