Wildnote teams: Build the tool your field team needs

How AI-assisted development lets environmental firms encode their own processes into app extensions, data events, and custom reports — without a developer.

You are your deliverables

Your clients see the report. They never see the work that made it possible.

They see the inspection write-up, the delineation summary, or the survey that goes into the project file. What they don’t see is the methodology behind it: how your team evaluates a BMP, makes and documents a wetland determination, or tracks what changes over a season.

That methodology is part of what your clients are paying for. It’s the experience your team has built over years, captured in SOPs and field guides, and passed from senior staff to newer employees. It’s what makes the work consistent, defensible, and recognizably yours.

Until recently, getting that methodology into a field tool usually meant one of two things: hire a developer, or adapt your process to the way the software vendor thought the work should be done. Neither option was particularly appealing.

Fulcrum gives you three ways to build your firm’s own logic into the field workflow, and AI-assisted development has made all three much more accessible to the people who actually understand the work.

Where your firm’s logic lives

The tools aren’t new, but who can build them has changed.

App extensions. Custom tools that open right inside your Fulcrum forms, do what they need to do, and write results back to the record.

Data events. JavaScript logic wired into form lifecycle moments: a record opens, a field changes, a record saves. The form responds to what’s happening, automatically.

Report templates. Custom output layouts that go beyond a generic export to produce what your clients and agency reviewers have come to expect.

The approach is sometimes called vibe coding. You describe what you need in plain language, an AI assistant writes the code, and you test and refine until it works. And you don’t need a software or engineering background, or a developer on your payroll, to do it.

Here’s what each looks like in practice.

App extensions: the custom tool inside your forms

An app extension is a custom, offline-capable tool that lives inside a Fulcrum form. Think of it as a panel your crew opens mid-record: a lookup, a calculator, a visualization, built for exactly the task at hand.

A few examples grounded in environmental fieldwork:

A species identification guide with selectable outputs. Your biologist taps a button in the survey and searches by common name. The search returns the scientific name, sensitive status, and your firm’s observation protocol notes without leaving the form. Selecting the species populates the record automatically, with no PDF to cross-reference and no risk of transcription error.

A BMP condition calculator. Your inspector records the BMP type, sediment accumulation, visible damage, and whether flow is bypassing or obstructed. The extension evaluates those observations against the applicable maintenance criteria and assigns a condition such as Functional, Maintenance Required, or Corrective Action Required. The inspector doesn’t have to interpret multiple thresholds or remember which criteria apply to each BMP. The extension writes the result directly into the inspection record.

Data-point completeness / QA check. Before the delineator leaves the point, the extension checks for missing details that could make the record harder to defend later: “Saturation present = Yes, but no saturation depth entered,” or “Problematic hydrophytic vegetation = Yes, but no explanation provided,” The delineator can resolve the gap while still standing at the data point instead of discovering it weeks later during QA.

A monitoring progress tracker. The extension rolls up completion status across a repeatable section such as sites surveyed, sites pending, and flagged items. The crew lead sees the current picture at a glance without counting rows.

Each of these is built to your protocols, scoring criteria, and workflow. That specificity is what makes them useful in the field.

Data events: your firm’s logic, wired into the form

Data events are JavaScript scripts wired into your form that fire automatically when things happen like a record opens, a field changes, a record saves, or a GPS location updates. They’re how your firm’s rules get encoded into the form itself.

A few things data events can do

The mechanics vary, but the pattern is the same. The form does something at the moment it matters, without waiting for anyone to remember. 

Identify which project area or permit boundary the inspection falls within. When the crew’s GPS updates, a data event checks which permit area, watershed, or project boundary the point falls inside and writes that assignment into the record. The crew stops hunting through dropdowns, and records stop getting misassigned at the end of a long day.

Pull current weather at the time of inspection. When a record is created, a data event requests current conditions and writes temperature, wind speed, and precipitation into the record. The conditions are captured from the moment the form opened, with no manual entry.

Filter dropdown choices dynamically based on what’s been entered. Select “riparian” as the habitat type and the species list narrows to species relevant to that habitat. Select a different project type and the BMP list adjusts. The form responds to what’s being documented rather than presenting every possible option every time.

Tap-to-increment tally counter. During an active biological survey, a crew member taps a button to count individuals rather than typing. Fast, glove-friendly, and accurate, it’s simple but genuinely useful in the field.

Before tools like this existed, these rules lived in people’s heads, in laminated field guides, and in the bullet points on your pre-field briefing checklist. Data events put them in the form instead.

Report templates: your output, your format

Your firm hands off two kinds of documents. The regulatory deliverable is a requirement. The client report is your reputation.

We’ll build your wetland determination, SHPO cultural resources, biological survey protocol, and required inspection templates as part of the transition. They’ll be ready when you are, so nothing starts from scratch.

Everything else your firm delivers runs on its own format, and nobody can hand you the template for it. A monthly monitoring summary, a seasonal SWPPP report, a habitat assessment write-up: each one goes to a different client carrying your firm’s logo, section structure, and language.

Until recently, producing one cleanly meant having it custom built by professional services. The alternatives were wrestling with merge fields or working through the syntax yourself.

The developer constraint is gone. Describe the report you want, including the sections, the fields that map to each one, and the way you want findings presented and photos placed. Get a working template back, then refine it until the output matches what your clients expect to open when the work is done.

Anyone can be a builder

Here’s the real shift.

App extensions, data events, and custom report templates have been in Fulcrum for a while. What’s different is who can build them.

For years that meant hiring a developer or waiting on the one you have.

Vibe coding changes that. Jared Carey works on Fulcrum’s customer success and product team. In one working session he built a construction progress tracker, a Procore-style nested rollup, that ran as a functioning proof of concept from a customer conversation. In June he walked through the whole process in a webinar, iteration included.

The same path is open to the project manager who knows what an inspector needs to see during a SWPPP review. The biologist who maintains your firm’s species reference can build the lookup tool, and the crew lead who knows which checks get skipped at the end of a long day can build the validation that catches them.

You keep doing your job, with the added ability to turn what you know into a working tool.

What Wildnote offered — and what’s different

Wildnote was built for environmental work, and it showed. The purpose-built, familiar and ready-to-use workflows were already there. Within that, you had flexibility to build your own forms for the work that didn’t fit a standard template.

What you couldn’t do was go deeper. You couldn’t add your own calculations to a form, or build a custom export or design your own report output. And you couldn’t wire in logic that responded to what your crew was entering in the field. The forms were yours to build, but the engine underneath them was fixed.

That’s the layer that app extensions, data events, and custom report templates unlock: your calculations, your logic, your output format, built to your firm’s specific protocols.

And now, with vibe coding, the person who understands the work well enough to know what the form should do can be the person who builds it.

How to get started with vibe coding

The Vibe code your way to better field operations webinar shows the whole process. In about 45 minutes, Jared builds a working tool live, so you see it before you try it yourself. By the end you’ll know whether this fits your team, and who on your team should try it first.

If you have a specific workflow in mind, reach out. It might be a form logic problem that’s never been solved, a report format you’ve been manually assembling, or a lookup tool your crew needs in the field. We’ll figure out what it would take to build it.

What’s coming next

When a photo isn’t enough — Fulcrum’s sketch, video, and audio tools for field teams. See you soon!

Catch up on the Wildnote transition series

Wildnote blog series

• More maps, less juggling 
• Your project data just got a lot easier to share
• Your forms just got a lot smarter 
• Your field data shouldn’t wait for a handoff

Watch and read

On-demand webinar: Vibe code your way to better field operations — without starting from scratch 
Blog: Sure, you can vibe-code a field app. But should you?
Data sheet: Vibe-coded vs. purpose-built: a field operations reality check