Back when I lived in Central Florida, it took me years to learn what native plants could benefit wildlife and the local ecosystem as I slowly replaced parts of my yard to make it more resilient to drought. After moving to Seattle a few years ago, I had to start all of that from scratch. LLMs made the process a bit easier but I still had to routinely ask the same kinds of questions over and over, despite being far more familiar with native plants these days and leaning more on native plant societies and botany resources like Doug Tallamy and Joey Santore whose excellent Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't site was recently posted here[1].

A good friend was visiting from Orlando over the summer and told me she was struggling to decide what to plant in her own yard despite her landlord being ok with it. That was enough of an excuse for me to kick off work on Indigene, which is aimed at giving folks just-in-time knowledge about what to plant based on their locale, sun exposure, soil conditions, and their own ecosystem support goals.

Candidly, as many of us have, I've also leaned heavily on LLMs (mostly Claude here) to bring this to life. Largely to avoid saying demonstrably false things, which might be an absurd statement. You can find the GitHub repository[2] a wild array of open data sources I've dug out and cross-referenced to ensure mistakes and hallucinations are unlikely to survive for long. But given today's Indigenous Peoples Day I figured it was past time I shared the projects and invited more scrutiny.

Being the Keep a Changelog guy, you can bet it has extensive release notes[3] generated from the project changelog. Those are also parsed into feature-specific guides so each also lists relevant recent updates.

Lastly, I put together a post[5] that goes into a bit more detail on the story of the project and what I've learned along the way.

I really, really hope people here (and beyond) find it as useful and enlightening as I do.

PS: before it comes up, all the LLM usage for the project is documented[6] and used as warning system in every PR but I think there's a lot more I can do to further reduce it

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192566

[2]: https://github.com/olivierlacan/indigene

[3]: https://indigene.app/release-notes/

[4]: https://indigene.app/guide/

[5]: https://constantvariable.net/blog/2026/indigene-native-plant...

[6]: https://indigene.app/llm/