r/ESRI

I made an AI assistant add-in that runs inside ArcGIS Pro. I teach GIS at the university level and do consulting work in ArcGIS Pro. Like everyone, I've watched students and colleagues keep ChatGPT open in a second window while working in Pro. The AI describes what buttons to click, you have to do the work, and half the answers are wrong because the AI can't see the project.

So I built Waldo, an add-in that puts the assistant inside Pro, connected to your live session. It can see your maps, layers, and schemas. It can advise, but it can also do the work: runs geoprocessing tools, sets symbology and labels, builds and exports layouts. The video is it doing a vineyard suitability analysis from one of my labs: DEM reclassify, slope, land cover, raster calculator, styled final map.

Design choices:

• Bring your own model. It works with an Anthropic or OpenAI API key, OpenRouter, or fully local models via Ollama/LM Studio. No subscription to me, and your data never touches my servers. The add-in itself never touches the network. The only outbound traffic is your own API calls to whichever provider you configured.
• There's an enforced read-only "Ask" mode — the assistant can inspect and explain your project but can't change anything. Enforced at the tool level, not a polite prompt.
• Built for people who don't trust AI output (I'm one of them): every geoprocessing run shows the exact parameters it used, and one click reopens the tool dialog pre-filled with them, so the AI's work is always reproducible by hand.

I use it in my own consulting work (it recently turned a multi-hour needs-assessment mapping job into an afternoon), and it's built around my 30 years of cartographic habits and best practices. It defaults to sane symbology, legends, and layouts instead of whatever an LLM improvises.

7-day free trial, $5 one-time after that, no accounts needed: waldogis.com

Genuinely interested in community reaction. Happy to answer anything about how it works and what it can and can't do.