My consulting work for Conservation International Foundation Ecuador, reinvented: instead of chatting with AI, I now work inside the project files with Claude Code: producing better deliverables, dashboards for the Cooperation Tables in Sucumbíos and Orellana, and email automation for the two-year roadmap.
I’m the consultant behind the technical accompaniment to establish two Mesas de Cooperantes (Cooperation Tables) for conservation and sustainable development in the Amazonian provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana. Contract runs October 2025 – April 2026. The work produces long, dense deliverables in Spanish (.docx reports, roadmaps, governance models, constitutional acts), plus the ongoing coordination of many stakeholders: provincial governments, NGOs, technical secretariats, and management groups. The provincial governments led the tables; my part was the method, the facilitation and the instruments.
Before Claude Code, I was using AI through chat interfaces: great for brainstorming, bad for real project work. Context was always lost. Every conversation started from zero. Feedback from the client had to be manually translated into edits. Deliverables lived in one place, my AI assistant lived in another, and I was the glue.
I moved the consultancy itself into Claude Code. The project folder holds every contract, every prior deliverable, every feedback document, every roadmap. Claude reads them directly: no re-explaining context, no copy-pasting.
What this unlocks:
.docx file, preserving formatting, comments, and the table-of-contents structure that Word demands.word/comments.xml, grouped them into 5 phases, and worked through each one, with me approving every change.The bigger shift is methodological: my consultancy is now a repository, not a series of chat threads.
The monitoring system is built and ready, and not yet deployed with the members. It was prepared for the launch workshop of the Sucumbíos provincial government on 25 April 2026. The public views are read-only and open to anyone: a landing page with live stats across both provinces, plus one panel each for Orellana and Sucumbíos with a scorecard, a filterable activity table and a timeline by sub-table.
Each member would get a personal link. A link with a unique token opens a “Mi trabajo” (my work) tab with the member’s agenda, streak, quarterly target and their sub-table’s standing. There is no way to pick an identity from the page, so nobody can act as someone else.
Reports are verified in one click. Members submit progress through a form. The technical secretariat verifies or rejects each report from its inbox or from Mi trabajo, and rejected reports link straight back to the activity. Reminder and notification emails go out from Google Apps Script.
Built to be trusted with public data. A live “Informe” (report) tab in both dashboards, CSV export, quarterly report pages, a data-sync command, and tests for priority scoring, the member states and the keyword matching that assigns activities to sub-tables. A May pass fixed data errors, Gmail compatibility and failures that had been silent.
Interactive dashboard for the 2026–2028 roadmap of one of the provinces: each action has an owner, a due date, and a status, and members of the Mesa can log in to track their part.
Client feedback parsed out of word/comments.xml and turned into a 14-action, 5-phase implementation plan.
python-docx + lxml. Tables of contents, comments, embedded images, and track changes all survive.word/comments.xml and are invisible to python-docx. I wrote a small parser that turns them into an actionable list. That became the bridge between client feedback and implementation.Stack: Claude Code, Python 3.13 (python-docx, lxml, zipfile), HTML/JS for dashboards, macOS textutil for quick text extraction.
The project folder functions like a small knowledge base: contract documents, previous deliverables (E2–E4), feedback files, and working drafts all sit side-by-side. Claude Code is instructed (via CLAUDE.md) on which files are targets for edits, which are reference-only, and the technical gotchas of editing .docx XML without breaking Word’s rendering.
CLAUDE.md, the contract, the prior deliverables, and the main report side-by-side.Entregable 5.docx and the feedback-implementation plan that came out of it..docx editing is fragile: always save-close-reopen between major edit phases, never modify paragraphs containing <w:drawing> or <w:pict>.“I’m a consultant working for Conservation International in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Claude Code replaced my chat-based AI workflow with something that lives inside the project itself: every contract, every deliverable, every comment from the client. It doesn’t just help me write; it helps me run the whole engagement. The dashboards and email automation are how I’m turning a report into something the stakeholders can actually use.”