Zoom in: I started gathering the basics with ChatGPT. It helped me ask the right questions and study my yard's existing plants, layout, sun exposure, soil and more.

My husband, Joe, used Claude Code and Three.js, an open source library for 3D animations, to create an AI prototype map of our land that shows the sun and shade each blade of grass gets on any day of the year.

• "It gives us the ability to take an inventory, understand what might be native or not, know how big trees will get," Joe tells me when I ask why he spent hours vibe coding this. "It helps us understand the history of things, and then also look to the future of what it could be."
• Lastly, we took all our research to our local nursery, and they helped us find the right plants. This is key.