Ex-county GIS tech: an LLM-written GDAL script would have saved his 200GB tile nightmare
dreamwieber · x · 2026-11-16
A former "GIS Technician II" at New York's Rockland County Planning Department recounts quitting after two weeks: his one project — converting 200GB of aerial imagery TIFFs into a performant tile layer for ArcGIS Pro and the county's online viewer — failed.
Key points:
- On a non-county computer it would have taken 30 seconds of active work: ask an LLM for a GDAL/Rasterio script and let it run overnight
- But county IT's howling terror of ransomware was rational — every year some U.S. county employee opens an attachment or passes credentials to a convincing stranger, causing expensive disruption
- He suspects much of local planning/GIS departments' intransigence stems from literally not knowing how to move big files within IT policy
A real-world case of bureaucratic constraints blocking the simplest AI-assisted solution.
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