Creating a map of Argentina's rivers
For the past decade I've used mbostock's map of U.S. Rivers as my desktop wallpaper. It was a perfect fit in an ideological and literal sense: water is an underappreciated (and mismanaged) resource, especially in the American Southwest, and the dimensions of the U.S. roughly matches 16:10 laptop displays.
I've recently spent a lot of time in Argentina, so I wanted something similar for my adopted home. I used Perplexity Research to find data sources for rivers/waterways of Argentina, and it led me to the HydroRIVERS South America dataset. I then used Claude Code to vibe-code a similar map of Argentina's waterways. I don't have much background with GIS or spatial data, but with some guidance (esp. with image skew/dimensions), it created a script to generate a map for Argentina. It even generated intermediate analysis scripts which it used to debug problems as I pointed them out.
The whole process took less than an hour and it's great to get a sense of the major rivers: the Paraná, Negro, Bermejo, Pilcomayo, and Colorado are all plainly visible. (While the Uruguay is second-largest, it forms the border with Uruguay and was filtered out.)
