[HN Gopher] Proof of Corn
___________________________________________________________________
Proof of Corn
Author : rocauc
Score : 277 points
Date : 2026-01-23 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (proofofcorn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (proofofcorn.com)
| bstsb wrote:
| somewhat related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311144
| nvader wrote:
| This is a very intriguing experiment!
|
| I'll be following along, and I'm curious what kind of harness
| you'll put on TOP of Claude code to avoid it stalling out on "We
| have planted 16/20 fields so far, and irrigated 9/16. Would you
| like me to continue?"
|
| I'd also like to know what your own "constitution" is regarding
| human oversight and intervention. Presumably you wouldn't want
| your investment to go down the drain if Claude gets stuck in a
| loop, or succumbs to a prompt injection attack to pay a
| contractor 100% of it's funds, or decides to water the fields
| with Brawndo.
|
| How much are you allowing yourself to step in, and how will you
| document those interventions?
| divbzero wrote:
| > _Want to help? Iowa land leads, ag expertise, vibe coders
| welcome:_ [ _email at proofofcorn dot com_ ]
|
| To make this a full AI experiment, emails to this inbox should be
| fielded by Claude as well.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Why do I need to help? Is this an experiment to see if it can
| do it on its own, or just another "project" where they give AI
| credit for human's work for marketing purposes?
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Several things about LLMs make this a hard or complex experiment
| and maybe too much for the current tech.
|
| 1) context: lack of sensors and sensor processing, maybe solvable
| with web cams in the field but manual labor required for soil
| testing etc
|
| 2)Time bias: orchestration still has a massive recency bias in
| LLMs and a huge underweighting of established ground truth.
| Causing it to weave and pivot on recent actions in a wobbly
| overcorrecting style.
|
| 3) vagueness: by and large most models still rely on non
| committal vagueness to hide a lack of detailed or granular
| expertise. This granular expertise tends to hallucinate more or
| just miss context more and get it wrong.
|
| I'm curious how they plan to overcome this. It's the right type
| of experiment, but I think too ambitious of a scale.
| treis wrote:
| It's cute but it seems like it's mostly going to come down to
| hiring a person to grow corn. Pretty cool that an AI can (sort
| of) do that autonomously but it's not quite the spirit of the
| challenge.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| There was no challenge. There was a statement, "AI can write
| code, but it can't affect the physical world."
| kennywinker wrote:
| Tell that to all the car accidents caused by people
| distracted by siri, the people who've done horrible things
| because of AI induced psychosis, or the lives ruined by ai
| stock trading algorithms.
| bwestergard wrote:
| Right. If this level of indirection is allowed, the most
| efficient way to "grow corn" by the light of the original post
| would simply be to buy and hold Farmland Partners Inc (NYSE:
| FPI).
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I'd like to see Fred follow right along and allocate the same
| amount of funds for deployment starting at the same time as
| each of Seth's expenditures or solid commitments.
|
| The timing might need to be different but it would be good to
| see what the same amounts invested would yield from corn on
| the commodity market as well as from securities in farming
| partnerships.
|
| Would it be fair if AI was used to play these markets too, or
| in parallel?
|
| It would be interesting to see how different "varieties" of
| corn perform under the same calendar season.
|
| Corn, nothing but corn as the actual standard of value :)
|
| You don't get much any way you look at it for your $12.99 but
| it's a start.
|
| Making a batch of popcorn now, I can already smell the demand
| on the rise :)
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Yeah, this feels right on the cusp of being interesting. I
| think that, being charitable, it _could_ be interesting if it
| turns out to be successful in hiring and coordinating several
| people and physical assets over a long time horizon. For
| example, it 'd be pretty cool if it could:
|
| 1. Do some research (as it's already done)
|
| 2. Rent the land and hire someone to grow the corn
|
| 3. Hire someone to harvest it, transport it, and store it
|
| 4. Manage to sell it
|
| Doing #1 isn't terribly exciting - it's well established that
| AIs are pretty good at replacing an hour of googling - but if
| it could run a whole business process like this, that'd be
| neat.
| malfist wrote:
| Is that actually growing corn with AI though? Seems to me
| that a human planted the corn, thinned it, weeded it,
| harvested it, and stored it. What did AI do in that process?
| Send an email?
| 9rx wrote:
| It is trying to take over the job of the farmer. Planting,
| harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom
| operator). Everyone is working to try to automate the
| farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking
| that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate
| away.
|
| But,
|
| "I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal"
|
| Who has multiple millions of dollars to drop on an
| experiment like that?
| jt2190 wrote:
| > [Seth is using AI to try] to take over the job of the
| farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a
| farmhand (or custom operator).
|
| Ok then Seth is missing the point of the challenge: Take
| over the role of the farmhand.
|
| > Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out
| of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is
| actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.
|
| Everyone knows this. There is nothing novel here. Desk
| jockeys who just drive computers all day (the Farmer in
| this example) are _far_ easier to automate away than the
| hands-on workers (the farmhand). That's why it would be
| truly revolutionary to replace the farmhand.
|
| Or, said another way: Anything about growing corn that is
| "hands on" is hard to automate, all the easy to automate
| stuff has already been done. And no, driving a mouse or a
| web browser doesn't count as "hands on".
| 9rx wrote:
| _> all the easy to automate stuff has already been done._
|
| To be fair, all the stuff that hasn't been automated away
| is the same in all cases, farmer and farmhand alike:
| Monitoring to make sure the computer systems don't screw
| up.
|
| The bet here is that LLMs are past the "needs monitoring"
| stage and can buy a multi-million dollar farm, along with
| everything else, without oversight and Seth won't be
| upset about its choices in the end. Which, in fairness,
| is a more practical (at least less risky form a liability
| point of view) bet than betting that a multi-million
| dollar X9 without an operator won't end up running over a
| person and later upside-down in the ditch.
|
| He may have many millions to spend on an experiment, but
| to truly put things to the test would require way more
| than that. Everyone has a limit. An MVP is a reasonable
| start. v2 can try to take the concept further.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Or, just buy some corn futures. By slightly increasing the
| price of this instrument, it slightly signals farmers to
| increase production. Corn grown!
| pfdietz wrote:
| User: Claude, determine the height of the building using this
| barometer.
|
| Claude: Go to the owner of the building and say "if you tell me
| the height of your building I will give you this fine
| barometer."
| bluGill wrote:
| There is more than that. He needs to decide which corn seed to
| plant (he is behind here - seed companies run sales if you
| order in October for delivery in mid march). He needs to decide
| what fertilizer to apply, and when. He needs to monitor the
| crop - he might or might not need to buy and apply a fungicide.
| He needs to decide when to harvest - too early and he pays a
| lot of money to dry the corn (and likely money to someone you
| hired to work who doesn't do anything), but too late and a
| storm can blow the corn off the cob... Those are just a few of
| the things a farmer needs to figure out that the AI would need
| to do (but will it)
| 9rx wrote:
| There are plenty of CCAs out there that will happily do all
| those things for you. If hiring someone to come work the
| field is fair game, surely that is too?
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Also what's the delta b/w Claude Code doing it and you doing
| it?
|
| I would have to look up farm services. Look up farmhand hiring
| services. Write a couple emails. Make a few payments. Collect
| my corn after the growing season. That's not an insurmountable
| amount of effort. And if we don't care about optimizing cost,
| it's very easy.
|
| Also, how will Claude monitor the corn growing, I'm curious. It
| can't receive and respond to the emails autonomously so you
| still have to be in the loop
| tootie wrote:
| It's like I can't grow corn, but I can buy corn. That's not the
| same thing. I can also write code to order corn for me,
| provided I supply it with a credit card and pay the bill. That
| is also not very interesting.
|
| Incidentally I clicked through to this guy's blog and found his
| predictions for 2025 and he was 0 for 13: https://avc.xyz/what-
| will-happen-in-2025-1
| qoez wrote:
| Eventually robots will do this but as long as humans do the
| actual irl actions it makes me think of a dystopian future where
| all leadership decision are made by harsh micromanaging AI bosses
| and low paying physical labor is the only job around for humans.
| jpmattia wrote:
| I think the most intriguing part of this effort: Farmers
| traditionally employ machines to achieve their harvest. Unless
| I'm mistaken, this is the first time that machines are employing
| humans to achieve their harvest.
|
| I mean, more or less, but you see what I'm getting at.
| kennywinker wrote:
| > Farmers traditionally employ machines to achieve their
| harvest
|
| Most food is picked by migrant laborers, not machines.
| mvidal01 wrote:
| It depends on the crop. Corn (Maize): Harvested using combine
| harvesters that pick, husk, and shell the grain. Sweet Corn
| might be the exception. Soybeans: Harvested using combines to
| cut and thresh the plants. Wheat, Barley, and Oats: Harvested
| using combines to cut, thresh, and clean the grain. Cotton:
| Harvested mechanically using cotton pickers or strippers.
| Rice: Mechanically harvested with combines when the stalks
| are dry. Potatoes and Root Vegetables: Lifted from the ground
| using mechanical harvesters that separate soil from the
| produce. Lettuce, Spinach, and Celery: Mostly hand-harvested
| by crews, though automation is increasing. Berries
| (Strawberries, Blueberries): Primarily hand-picked for fresh
| market quality, though some are machine-harvested for
| processing. Tree Fruits (Apples, Cherries): Mostly hand-
| picked to prevent bruising, though some processing cherries
| use tree shakers. Wine Grapes: Frequently harvested by hand
| to ensure quality, especially for high-end wines. Peppers and
| Tomatoes: Processed tomatoes are machine-harvested, while
| fresh peppers are largely hand-picked.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Didn't want to have it make paperclips, eh?
|
| (And if you read the linked post, ... like this value function is
| established on a whim, with far less thought than some of the
| value-functions-run-amok in scifi...)
|
| (and if you've never played it:
| https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html )
| geuis wrote:
| That game is entirely too addictive especially at 3am.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I'm not a huge fan of these experiments that subject the public
| to your random AI spam. So far it's bothered 10 companies
| directly with no legal authority to actually follow up with what
| is requested?
| kennywinker wrote:
| But harassing people is one of AI's greatest strengths!
| ge96 wrote:
| brb doing a Clause master class talk at $500 a head
| deejaaymac wrote:
| I'm not a huge fan of the unsolicited spam/letters/coupons/etc
| I get in my mail box from businesses and there's no way for me
| to opt out.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| FTR Some jurisdictions have laws where you can place a sign
| on your letterbox to prohibit that sort of spam from being
| placed in your mail.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Not sure how relevant that is but yeah, that sucks too.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I think they're saying that businesses getting unsolicited
| offers from the LLM is similar to regular people getting
| unsolicited offers from businesses.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| You can actually act on the advertisements and coupons,
| though. And the companies who sent those offers to you are
| obligated to abide by them. This potentially would be like if
| you got a BOGO coupon in the mail and when you tried to
| redeem it, they just pretended like it didn't exist.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| This isn't even that - isn't it contacting people about using
| services they publicly offer?
| sgustard wrote:
| I have more confidence that if I reply "never contact me
| again" to AI it might actually obey, unlike any people that
| have spammed me.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >So far it's bothered 10 companies directly with no legal
| authority to actually follow up with what is requested?
|
| Aren't these companies in the business of leasing land? I dont
| see how contacting them about leasing land would be spam or
| bothering them. And I dont really know what you mean by "with
| no legal authority to actually follow up with what is
| requested."
| snowmobile wrote:
| I mean, it's probably worse to pretend to be an actual
| customer, rather than sending some random message. The AI's
| obviously never going to actually lease any land, so all its
| doing is convincingly wasting their time. At least landlords
| are often quite unsympathetic, so it's probably fine to waste
| their time a bit.
| rdlw wrote:
| What do you mean? There's $1370 earmarked for the lease.
| lupire wrote:
| The _chatbot_ has no legal authority.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Even the blog post reads like it was written by AI.
| gritspants wrote:
| Your job is to grow corn.
|
| Claude: Oh. My. God.
| Kkoala wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| But where is the prompt or api calls to Claude? I can't see that
| in the repo
|
| Or did Claude generate the code and repo too? And there is a
| separate project to run it
| silveira wrote:
| https://farm.bot/ exists.
| space_greg wrote:
| Reminds me of this project from friends of mine:
|
| https://autonomousforest.org/map
| ppchain wrote:
| The point they seem to be making is that AI can "orchestrate" the
| real world even if it can't interact physically. I can definitely
| believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to
| money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers
| to get real people to grow corn for you.
|
| However even by that metric I don't see how Claude is doing that.
| Seth is the one researching the suppliers "with the help of"
| Claude. Seth is presumably the one deciding when to prompt Claude
| to make decisions about if they should plant in Iowa in how many
| days. I think I could also grow corn if someone came and asked me
| well defined questions and then acted on what I said. I might
| even be better at it because unlike a Claude output I will still
| be conscious in 30 seconds.
|
| That is a far cry from sitting down at a command like and saying
| "Do everything necessary to grow 500 bushels of corn by October".
| embedding-shape wrote:
| These experiments always seems to end up requiring the hand-
| holding of a human at top, seemingly breaking down the idea
| behind the experiment in the first place. Seems better to spend
| the time and energy on finding better ways for AI to work hand-
| in-hand with the user, empowering them, rather than trying to
| find the areas where we could replace humans with as little
| quality degradation as possible. That whole part feels like a
| race to the bottom, instead of making it easier for the ones
| involved to do what they do.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Using the example from the article, I guess restaurant
| managers need handholding by the chefs and servers, seemingly
| breaking down the idea behind restaurants, yet restaurants
| still exist.
|
| The point, I think, is that even if LLMs can't directly
| perform physical operations, they can still make decisions
| about what operations are to be performed, and through that
| achieve a result.
|
| And I also don't think it's fair to say there's no point just
| because there's a person prompting and interpreting the LLM.
| That happens all the time with real people, too.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > And I also don't think it's fair to say there's no point
| just because there's a person prompting and interpreting
| the LLM. That happens all the time with real people, too.
|
| Yes, what I'm trying to get at, it's much more vital we
| nail down the "person prompting and interpreting the LLM"
| part instead of focusing so much on the "autonomous robots
| doing everything".
| LoganDark wrote:
| I feel you're still missing the point of the
| experiment... The entire thing was based on how Claude
| felt empowering -- "I felt like I could do anything with
| software from my terminal"... It's not at all about
| autonomous robots... It's about what someone can achieve
| with the assistance of LLMs, in this case Claude
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I think we might have read two different articles.
| santadays wrote:
| > I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their
| computer with access to money can send the right emails and
| make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn
| for you.
|
| I think this is the new turing test. Once it's been passed we
| will have AGI and all the Sam Altmans of the world will be
| proven correct. (This isn't a perfect test obviously, but
| neither was the turing test)
|
| If it fails to pass we will still have what jdthedisciple
| pointed out
|
| > a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on
| his own without prior experience
|
| I am actually curious how many people really believe AGI will
| happen. Theres alot of talk about it, but when can I ask
| claude code to build me a browser from scratch and I get a
| browser from scratch. Or when can I ask claude code to grow
| corn and claude code grows corn. Never? In 2027? In 2035? In
| the year 3000?
|
| HN seems rife with strong opinions on this, but does anybody
| really know?
| bayindirh wrote:
| Researchers love to reduce everything into formulae, and
| believe that when they have the right set of formulae, they
| can simulate something as-is.
|
| Hint: It doesn't work that way.
|
| Another hint: I'm a researcher.
|
| Yes, we have found a great way to compress and remix the
| information we scrape from the internet, and even with some
| randomness, looks like we can emit the right set of tokens
| which makes sense, or search the internet the right way and
| emit these search results, but AGI is more than that.
|
| There's so much tacit knowledge and implicit computation
| coming from experience, emotions, sensory inputs and from
| our own internal noise. AI models doesn't work on those.
| LLMs consume language and emit language. The information
| embedded in these languages are available to them, but most
| of the tacit knowledge is just an empty shell of the thing
| we try to define with the limited set of words.
|
| It's the same with anything we're trying to replace humans
| in real world, in daily tasks (self-driving, compliance
| check, analysis, etc.).
|
| AI is missing the magic grains we can't put out as words or
| numbers or anything else. The magic smoke, if you pardon
| the term. This is why no amount of documentation can
| replace a knowledgeable human.
|
| ...or this is why McLaren Technology Center's aim of "being
| successful without depending on any specific human by
| documenting everything everyone knows" is an impossible
| goal.
|
| Because like it or not, intuition is real, and AI lacks it.
| Irrelevant of how we derive or build that intuition.
| smaudet wrote:
| > There's so much tacit knowledge and implicit
| computation coming from experience, emotions, sensory
| inputs and from our own internal noise.
|
| The premise of the article is stupid, though...yes, they
| aren't us.
|
| A human might grow corn, or decide it should be grown.
| But the AI doesn't need corn, it won't grown corn, and it
| doesn't need any of the other things.
|
| This is why, they are not useful _to us_.
|
| Put it in science fiction terms. You can create a
| monster, and it can have super powers, _but that does not
| make it useful to us_. The extremely hungry monster will
| eat everything it sees, but it won't make anyone's life
| better.
| godelski wrote:
| > Hint: It doesn't work that way.
|
| I mean... _technically_ it would work this way but, and
| this is a big but, reality is extremely complicated and a
| model that can actually be a reliable formula has to be
| extremely complicated. There 's almost certainly no
| globally optimal solutions to these types of problems,
| not to mention that the solution space is constantly
| changing as the world does. I mean this is why we as
| humans and all animals work in probabilistic frameworks
| that are highly adaptable. Human intuition. Human
| ingenuity. We simply haven't figured out how to make
| models at that level of sophistication. Not even in
| narrow domains! What AI has done is undeniably
| impressive, wildly impressive even. Which is why I'm so
| confused why we embellish it so much.
|
| It's really easy to think everything is easy when we look
| at problems from 40k feet. But as you come down to Earth
| the complexity exponentially increases and what was a
| minor detail is now a major problem. As you come down
| resolution increases and you see major problems that you
| couldn't ever see from 40k feet.
|
| As a researcher, I agree very much with you. And as an AI
| researcher one of the biggest issues I've noticed with AI
| is that they abhor detail and nuance. Granted, this is
| common among humans too (and let's not pretend CS people
| don't have a stereotype of oversimplification and
| thinking all things are easy). While people do this
| frequently they also don't usually do it in their niche
| domains, and if they are we call them juniors. You get
| programmers thinking building bridges is easy[0] while
| you get civil engineers thinking writing programs is
| easy. Because each person understands the other's job
| only at 40k feet _and_ are reluctant to believe they are
| standing so high[1]. But AI? It really struggles with
| detail. It really struggles with adaptation. You can get
| detail out but it often requires significant massaging
| and it 'll still be a roll of the dice[2]. You also can
| get the AI to change course, a necessary thing as
| projects evolve[3]. Anyone who's tried vibe coding knows
| the best thing to do is just start over. It's even in
| Anthropic's suggestion guide.
|
| My problem with vibe coding is that it encourages this
| overconfidence. AI systems still have the exact same
| problem computer systems do: they do exactly what you
| tell them to. They are better at interpreting intent but
| that blade cuts both ways. The major issue is you can't
| properly evaluate a system's output unless you were
| entirely capable of generating the output. The AI misses
| the details. Doubt me? Look at Proof of Corn! The fred
| page is saying there's an API error[4]. The sensor page
| doesn't make sense (everything there is fine for an at
| home hobby project but anyone that's worked with those
| parts knows how unreliable they are. Who's going to do
| all the soldering? You making PCBs? Where's the circuit
| to integrate everything? How'd we get to $300? Where's
| the detail?). Everything discussed is at a 40k foot view.
|
| [0] https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/
|
| [1] I'm not sure why people are afraid of not knowing
| things. We're all dumb as shit. But being dumb as shit
| doesn't mean we aren't also impressive and capable of
| genius. Not knowing something doesn't make you dumb, it
| makes you human. Depth is infinite and we have
| priorities. It's okay to have shallow knowledge, often
| that's good enough.
|
| [2] As implied, what is enough detail is constantly up
| for debate.
|
| [3] No one, absolutely nobody, has everything figured out
| from the get-go. I'll bet money none of you have written
| a (meaningful) program start to finish from plans, ending
| up with exactly what you expect, never making an error,
| never needing to change course, even in the slightest.
|
| Edit:
|
| [4] The API issue is weird and the more I look at the
| code the more weird things are. Like there's a file
| decision-engine/daily_check.py that has a comment to set
| a cron job to run every 8 hours. It says to dump data to
| logs/daily.log but that file doesn't exist but it will
| write to logs/all_checks.jsonl which appears to have the
| data. So why in the world is it reading https://farmer-
| fred.sethgoldstein.workers.dev/weather?
| cevn wrote:
| I think once we get off LLM's and find something that more
| closely maps to how humans think, which is still not known
| afaik. So either never or once the brain is figured out.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'd agree that LLMs are a dead end to AGI, but I don't
| think that AI needs to mirror our own brains very closely
| to work. It'd be really helpful to know how our brains
| work if we wanted to replicate them, but it's possible
| that we could find a solution for AI that is entirely
| different from human brains while still having the
| ability to truly think/learn for itself.
| brookst wrote:
| This is where it's a mistake to conflate sentience and
| intelligence. We don't need to figure out sentience, just
| intelligence.
| metalman wrote:
| "new turing test" indeed!,any farmer worth his salt will
| smell a sucker and charge acordingly
| kortex wrote:
| I think we are closer than most folks would like to admit.
|
| in my wild guess opinion:
|
| - 2027: 10%
|
| - 2030s: 50%
|
| - 2040: >90%
|
| - 3000: 100%
|
| Assuming we don't see an existential event before then, i
| think it's inevitable, and soon.
|
| I think we are gonna be arguing about the definition of
| "general intelligence" long after these system are already
| running laps around humans at a wide variety of tasks.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >ather than trying to find the areas where we could replace
| humans with as little quality degradation as possible
|
| The particular problem here is it is very likely that the
| easiest people to replace with AI are the ones making the
| most money and doing the least work. Needless to say those
| people are going to fight a lot harder to remain employed
| than the average lower level person has political capital to
| accomplish.
|
| >seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at
| top,
|
| I was born on a farm and know quite a bit about the process,
| but in the process of trying to get corn grown from seed to
| harvest I would still contact/contract a set of skilled
| individuals to do it for me.
|
| One thing I've come to realize in the race to achieve AGI,
| the humans involved don't want AGI, _they want ASI_. A single
| model that can do what an expert can, in every field, in a
| short period of time is not what I would consider a general
| intelligence at all.
| mring33621 wrote:
| "...where we could replace humans with as little quality
| degradation as possible"
|
| This is pretty much the whole goal of capitalism since the
| 1800's
| ge96 wrote:
| Would be crazy it's looking through satellite imagery and is
| like "buy land in Africa" or whatever and gets a farm going
| there
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| So Seth, as presumably a non-farmer, is doing professional
| farmer's work all on his own without prior experience? Is that
| what you're saying?
| tekno45 wrote:
| trying. until you can eat it, you're just fucking around.
| LoganDark wrote:
| He's writing it down, so it's also science.
| tekno45 wrote:
| exactly, its science/research, until you can feed people
| its not really farming.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >until you can feed people
|
| So if I grow biomass for fuel or feedstock for plastics
| that's not farming? I'm sure there are a number of people
| that would argue with you on that.
|
| I'm from the part of the country where there large chunks
| of land dedicated to experimental grain growing, which is
| research, and other than labels at the end of crop rows
| you'd have a difficult time telling it from any other
| farm.
|
| TL:DR, why are you gatekeeping this so hard?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Thats not the point of the original commenter. The point of
| the original commenter is that he expects Claude can inform
| him well enough to be a farm manager and its not impressive
| since Seth is the primary agent.
|
| I think it is impressive if it works. Like I mentioned in a
| sibling comment I think it already definitely proves
| something LLMs have accomplished though, and that is giving
| people tremendous confidence to try things.
| cubano wrote:
| > I think it is impressive if it works.
|
| It only works if you tell Claude..."grow me some fucking
| corn profitably and have it ready in 9 months" and it
| does it.
|
| If it's being used as manager to simply flesh out the
| daily commands that someone is telling it, well then that
| isn't "working" thats just a new level of what we already
| have with APIs and crap.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to
| bootstrap becoming a farmer
|
| 2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature
| of AI: It makes people confident.
|
| The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it
| may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at
| times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things
| without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to
| act.
|
| You even see it with _basic_ emails. Myself included. I 'm
| just writing a simple email at work. But I can feed it into
| AI and make some minor edits to make it feel like my own
| words and I can just dispense with worries about "am i giving
| too much info, not enough, using the right tone, being
| unnecessarily short or overly greating, etc." And its not
| that the LLMs are necessarily even an authority on these
| factors - it simply bypasses the process (writing) which
| triggers these thoughts.
| kokanee wrote:
| I started to write a logical rebuttal, but forget it. This
| is just so dumb. A guy is paying farmers to farm for him,
| and using a chatbot to Google everything he doesn't know
| about farming along the way. You're all brainwashed.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| What specifically are you disagreeing with? I dont think
| its trivial for someone with no farming experience to
| successfully farm something within a year.
|
| >A guy is paying farmers to farm for him
|
| Read up on farming. The labor is not the complicated
| part. Managing resources, including telling the labor
| what to do, when, and how is the complicated part. There
| is a lot of decision making to manage uncertainty which
| will make or break you.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| We should probably differentiate between trying to run a
| profitable farm, and producing any amount of yield.
| They're not really the same thing at all.
|
| I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable
| of growing some amount of crops, given enough money.
| Running a profitable farm is quite difficult though.
| There's an entire ecosystem connecting prospective
| farmers with money and limited skills/interest to people
| with the skills to properly operate it, either
| independently (tenant farmers) or as farm managers so the
| hobby owner can participate. Institutional investors
| prefer the former, and Jeremy Clarkson's farm show is a
| good example of the latter.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >A guy is paying farmers to farm for him
|
| Family of farmers here.
|
| My family raises hundreds of thousands of chickens a
| year. They feed, water, and manage the healthcare and
| building maintenance for the birds. That is it. Baby
| birds show up in boxes at the start of a season, and
| trucks show up and take the grown birds once they reach
| weight.
|
| There is a large faceless company that sends out
| contracts for a particular value and farmers can decide
| to take or leave it. There is zero need for human contact
| on the management side of the process.
|
| At the end of the day there is little difference between
| a company assigning the work and having a bank account
| versus an AI following all the correct steps.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> A guy is paying farmers to farm for him_
|
| Pedantically, that's what a farmer does. The workers are
| known as farmhands.
| AngryData wrote:
| That is HIGHLY dependent on the type and size of farm. A
| lot of small row crop farmers have and need no extra farm
| hands.
| 9rx wrote:
| All farms need farmhands. On some farms the farmer may
| play double duty, or hire custom farmhands operating
| under another business, but they are all farmhands just
| the same.
| TheGrassyKnoll wrote:
| > "...a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people
| confident." Good point. AI is already
| making regular Joes into software engineers.
|
| Management is so confident in this, they are axing
| developers/not hiring new ones.
| recursive wrote:
| More confidence isn't always better. In particular,
| confidence pairs well with the ability follow through and
| be correct. LLMs are famous for confidently stating
| falsehoods.
| culi wrote:
| Nobody is denying that this is AI-enabled but that's entirely
| different from "AI can grow corn".
|
| Also Seth a non-farmer was already capable of using Google,
| online forums, and Sci-Hub/Libgen to access farming-related
| literature before LLMs came on the scene. In this case the
| LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. A great
| and useful technology, sure. But we're not utilizing any
| entirely novel capabilities here
|
| And tbh until we take a good crack at World Models I doubt we
| can
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I think is that a lot of professional work is not about
| entirely novel capabilities either, most professionals get
| the major revenue from bread and butter cases that apply
| already known solutions to custom problems. For instance, a
| surgeon taking out an appendix is not doing a novel
| approach to the problem every time.
| tjr wrote:
| I would say that Seth is farming just as much as non-
| developers are now building software applications.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Can't wait to see how much money they lose.
|
| I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.
| cubano wrote:
| > I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.
|
| Sure..put it in Kalshi while your at it and we can all bet
| on it.
|
| I'm pretty sure he could grow one plant with someone in the
| know prompting him.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Anyone can be a farmer. I've got veggies in my garden. Making
| a profit year after year is much much harder.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Another way to look at it is that Seth is a Tool that Claude
| can leverage.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| On one end, a farmer or agronomist who just uses a pen,
| paper, and some education and experience can manage a farm
| without any computer tooling at all - or even just forecasts
| the weather and chooses planting times based on the aches in
| their bones and a finger in the dirt. One who uses a
| spreadsheet or dedicated farming ERP as a tool can be a
| little more effective. With a lot of automation, that
| software tooling can allow them to manage many acres of farms
| more easily and potentially more accurately. But if you keep
| going, on the other end, there's just a human who knows
| nothing about the technicalities but owns enough stock in the
| enterprise to sit on the board and read quarterly earnings
| reports. They can do little more than say "Yes, let us keep
| going in this direction" or "I want to vote in someone else
| to be on the executive team". Right now, all such
| corporations have those operational decisions being made by
| humans, or at least outsourced to humans, but it looks
| increasingly like an LLM agent could do much of that. It
| might hallucinate something totally nonsensical and the owner
| would be left with a pile of debt, but it's hard to say that
| Seth as just a stockholder is, in any real sense, a farmer,
| even if his AI-based enterprise grows a lot of corn.
|
| I think it would be unlikely but interesting if the AI
| decided that in furtherance of whatever its prompt and
| developing goals are to grow corn, it would branch out into
| something like real estate or manufacturing of agricultural
| equipment. Perhaps it would buy a business to manufacture
| high-tensile wire fence, with a side business of heavy-duty
| paperclips... and we all know where that would lead!
|
| We don't yet have the legal frameworks to build an AI that
| owns itself (see also "the tree that owns itself" [1]), so
| for now there will be a human in the loop. Perhaps that human
| is intimately involved and micromanaging, merely a hands-off
| supervisor, or relegated to an ownership position with no
| real capacity to direct any actions. But I don't think that
| you can say that an owner who has not directed any actions
| beyond the initial prompt is really "doing the work".
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
| autoexec wrote:
| If that were the case Claude would have come up with the idea
| to grow corn and it would have reached out to Seth and be
| giving Seth prompts. That's clearly not what happened though
| so it's pretty obvious who is leveraging which tool here.
|
| It also doesn't help that Claude is incapable of coming up
| with an idea, incapable of wanting corn, and has no actual
| understanding of what corn is.
| recursive wrote:
| Generally agree. But lack of "understanding" seems
| impossible to define in objective terms. Claude could
| certainly write you a nice essay about the history of corn
| and its use in culture and industry.
| autoexec wrote:
| I could get the same thing out of "curl
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn" but curl doesn't
| understand what corn is any more than Claude does. Claude
| doesn't understand corn any more than Wikipedia either.
| Just like with Wikipedia, everything Claude outputs about
| corn came from the knowledge of humans which was fed into
| it by other humans, then requested by other other humans.
| It's human understanding behind all of it. Claude is just
| a different way to combine and output examples of human
| thoughts and human gathered data.
| lukev wrote:
| Right. This whole process still appears to have a human as the
| ultimate outer loop.
|
| Still an interesting experiment to see how much of the _tasks_
| involved can be handled by an agent.
|
| But unless they've made a commitment _not to prompt the agent
| again until the corn is grown_ , it's really a human doing it
| with agentic help, not Claude working autonomously.
| marcd35 wrote:
| Why wouldn't they be able to eventually set it up to work
| autonomously? A simple github action could run a check every
| $t hour to check on the status, and an orchestrator is only
| really needed once initially to set up the if>then decision
| tree.
| patmcc wrote:
| That still doesn't seem autonomous in any real way though.
|
| There are people that I could hire in the real world, give
| $10k (I dunno if that's enough, but you understand what I
| mean) and say "Do everything necessary to grow 500 bushels
| of corn by October", and I would have corn in October.
| There are no AI agents where that's even close to true.
| When will that be possible?
| autoexec wrote:
| Given enough time and money the chatbots we call "AI"
| today could contact and pay enough people that corn would
| happen. At some point it'll eventually have spammed and
| paid the right person who would manage everything
| necessary themselves after the initial ask and payment.
| Most people would probably just pocket the cash and never
| respond though.
| greedo wrote:
| So an "AI chatbot" is going to disintermediate this
| process without adding any fundamental value. Sounds like
| a perfect SV play....
|
| /s
| sdwr wrote:
| The question is whether the system can be responsible for
| the process. Big picture, AI doing 90% of the task isn't
| much better than it doing 50%, because a person still needs
| to take responsibility for it actually getting done.
|
| If Claude only works when the task is perfectly planned and
| there are no exceptions, that's still operating at the
| "junior" level, where it's not reliable or composable.
| andoando wrote:
| Presumably because operating a farm isnt a perfectly
| repeatable process and you need to constantly manage
| different issues that come up
| bluGill wrote:
| You only want to apply expensive fungicide when there is a
| fungus problem. That means someone needs to go out to the
| field and check - at least today. You don't want to harvest
| until the corn is dry, someone needs to check the progress
| of drying before - today the farmer hand harvest a few cobs
| of corn from various parts of the field to check. There are
| lots of other things the farmer is checking that we don't
| have sensors for - we could but they would be too
| expensive.
| aqme28 wrote:
| There's no reason an AI couldn't anticipate these things
| and hire people to do those checks and act on their
| reports as though it were a human farmer. Thats different
| than an AI researcher telling Claude which step is next.
| greedo wrote:
| "hire people to do those..."
|
| We already have those people, they're called farmers. And
| they are already very used to working with high
| technology. The idea of farmers being a bunch of hicks is
| really pretty stupid. For example, farmers use drones for
| spraying pesticides, fungicides, and inputs like
| fertilizer. They use drones to detect rocks in fields
| that then generate maps for a small skid steer to
| optimally remove the rocks.
|
| They use GPS enabled tractors and combines that can tell
| how deep a seed is planted, what the yield is on a
| specific field (to compare seed hybrids), what the
| moisture content of the crop is. They need to be able to
| respond to weather quickly so that crops get harvested at
| the optimal times.
|
| Farmers also have to become experts in crop futures, crop
| insurance, irrigation and tillage best practices; small
| equipment repair, on and on and on.
| pests wrote:
| > But unless they've made a commitment not to prompt the
| agent again
|
| Model UI's like Gemini have "scheduled actions" so in the
| initial prompt you could have it do things daily and send
| updates or reports, etc, and it will start the conversation
| with you. I don't think its powerful enough to say spawn sub
| agents but there is some ability for them to "start chats".
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Yes. In other words, this is a nice exemplification of the
| issue that AI lacks world models. A case study to work through.
| Oras wrote:
| I think that's the point though. If they succeeded in the
| experiment, they wouldn't need to do the same instructions
| again, AI will handle everything based on what happened and
| probably learn from mistakes for the next round(s).
|
| Then what you asked "do everything to grow ..." would be a
| matter of "when?", not "can?"
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Isnt this boiled down to a cpmination of Xenos paradox and the
| halting problem. Every step seems to halve the problem state
| but each new state requires a question: should I halt? (Is the
| problem solved).
|
| Id say the only acceptable proof is one prompt context. But
| thats godels numbering Xenos paradox of a halting problem.
|
| Do people think prompting is not adding insignificant
| intelligencw.
| tw04 wrote:
| >I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their
| computer with access to money can send the right emails and
| make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn
| for you.
|
| They could also just burn their cash. Because they aren't
| making any money paying someone to grow corn for them unless
| they own the land and have some private buyers lined up.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Sure but that's a different goalpost. Just growing food from
| an AI prompt is already impressive
| progval wrote:
| Anthropic tried that with a vending machine. The Claude
| instance managing it ended up ordering tungsten cubes and
| selling them at a loss.
| https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
| 9dev wrote:
| > the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI
| models are autonomously running things in the real economy.
|
| A plot line in Ray Naylers great book _The Mountain in the
| Sea_ that plays in a plausible, strange, not-too-distant
| future, is that giant fish trawler fleet are run by AI
| connected to the global markets, fully autonomously. They
| relentlessly rip every last fish from the ocean, driven
| entirely by the goal of maximising profits at any cost.
|
| The world is coming along just nicely.
| topaz0 wrote:
| They also enslave human workers to do all the manual labor.
| 9dev wrote:
| I didn't want to spoiler too much, but yes. They do.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| This is where you get to this weird juxtaposition of "AI can
| now replace humans" existing simultaneously with "Its unfair to
| compare human work to AI work".
|
| Like if a human said they started a farm, but it turns out
| someone else did all the leg work and they were just asked for
| an opinion occasionally, they'd be called out for lying about
| starting a farm. Meanwhile, that flies for an AI, which would
| be fine if we acknowledged that theres a lot of behind the
| scenes work that a human needs to do for it.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > AI doesn't need to drive a tractor. It needs to orchestrate the
| systems and people who do.
|
| If people are involved then it's not an autonomous system. You
| could replace the orchestrator with the average logic defined
| expert system. Like come on, farming AGVs have come a long way,
| at least do it properly.
| bluGill wrote:
| Polk County Iowa is where Des Moines is - the largest city in
| Iowa. (I live the next county over, but I bike to Polk county all
| the time) This is not a good location to run this because the
| farm land is owned by farmer/investors or farmer/developers -
| either way everybody knows the farm will become a suburb in the
| next 20 years and has priced accordingly (and if the timeline is
| is less than 5 years they have switched to mining mode - strip
| out the last fertility before the development destroys the land
| anyway). Which is to say you can get much better land deals
| elsewhere (and by making your search wider) - sometimes the price
| might be higher but that is because the land/soil is better.
|
| Overall I don't think this is useful. They might or might not get
| good results. However it is really hard to beat the
| farmer/laborer who lives close to the farm and thus sees things
| happen and can react quickly. There is also great value in
| knowing your land, though they should get records of what has
| happened in the past (this is all in a computer, but you won't
| always get access to it when you buy/lease land). Farmers are
| already using computers to guide decisions.
|
| My prediction: they lose money. Not because the AI does stupid
| things (though that might happen), but because last year harvests
| were really good and so supply and demand means many farms will
| lose money no matter what you do. But if the weather is just
| right he could make a lot of money when other farmers have a
| really bad harvest (that is he has a large harvest but everyone
| else has a terrible harvest).
|
| Iowa has strong farm ownership laws. There is real risk he will
| get shutdown somehow because what he is doing is somehow illegal.
| I'm not sure what the laws are, check with a real lawyer. (This
| is why Bill Gates doesn't own Iowa farm land - he legally can't
| do what he wants with Iowa farm land)
| bjt wrote:
| It reminds me of when I worked at an ag tech startup for a few
| years. We visited farms up and down the central valley of
| California, and the general tone toward Silicon Valley is an
| intense dislike of overconfident 20-somethings with a prototype
| who think they're going to revolutionize agriculture in some
| way, but are far, far away from having enough context to see
| the constraints they're operating under and the tradeoffs being
| made.
|
| Replacing the farm manager with an AI multiplies that problem
| by a hundred. A thousand? A million? A lot. AI may get some
| sensor data but it's not going to stick its hand in the dirt
| and say "this feels too dry". It won't hear the weird pinging
| noise that the tractor's been making and describe it to the
| mechanic. It may try to hire underlings but, how will it know
| which employees are working hard and which ones are stealing
| from it? (Compare Anthropic's experiments with having AI run a
| little retail store, and get tricked into selling tungsten
| cubes at a steep discount.)
|
| I got excited when I opened the website and at first had the
| impression that they'd actually gotten AI to grow something.
| Instead it's built a website and sent some emails. Not worth
| our attention, yet.
| Yeroc wrote:
| If you spend time on the website you can see the plan is to
| rent (only!) 5 acres of land for this project. Since it's a
| lease only and such a small plot it seems unlikely to get him
| into trouble. Given the small size though I'm dubious he'll
| find it easy to get any custom operators interested in doing a
| job that small!
| bluGill wrote:
| You can find such custom operators - but those are not deal
| made over the internet, they are made in person with a
| handshake. Generally the cost to get all the equipment there
| is - in a good year - all of your possible profit for
| something that small. Tractors are slow on the road. Once the
| tractor is there the implement needs to unfold (best case -
| worse case your combine header is pulled in via a separate
| truck and needs to be attached). You need to clean the
| machine out after every field and put new seed in... It isn't
| worth planting 5 acres of corn. You need volume - and in turn
| a lot of land - to make corn work.
| Yeroc wrote:
| Agreed. Growing up on a small farm (~1120 acres) our garden
| alone was probably at least 5 acres in size. It's laughably
| small, the only way he'll succeed is for a neighbouring
| farmer to take pity on him.
| rappatic wrote:
| I love the variety of people that come to HN. There are
| real farmers weighing on on the plausibility of this.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| If a neighboring farmer needs a bit of cash, has some
| land or equipment, and gets an email (or phone call!)
| from farmerfred@proofofcorn.com reading generally:
|
| > _I 'm about to lease some acreage at {address near you}
| and willing to pay {competitive rate} to hire someone to
| work that land for me, are you interested?_
|
| I see no reason why that couldn't eventually succeed. I'm
| sure that being an out-of-state investor who doesn't have
| any physical hands to finalize the deal with a handshake
| is an impediment, but with enough tokens, Farmer Fred
| could make 100,000 phone calls and send out 100,000
| emails to every landowner and work-for-hire equipment
| operator in Iowa, Texas, and Argentina by this afternoon.
| If there exists a human who would make that deal, Fred
| can eventually find them. Seth would be limited in his
| chance to succeed in these efforts because he can only
| make one 1-minute phone call per minute, Fred can become
| as many callers as Anthropic owns GPUs.
|
| I do find it amusing that Fred currently shows the
| following dashboard: Iowa HOLD
| 0degF Unknown (API error) Fred's
| Thinking: "Iowa is frozen solid. Been through worse. We
| wait." Fred is here South Texas
| HOLD 0degF Unknown (API error)
| Fred's Thinking: "South Texas is frozen solid. Been
| through worse. We wait." Argentina
| HOLD 0degF Unknown (API error)
| Fred's Thinking: "Argentina is frozen solid. Been through
| worse. We wait."
|
| Any human Fred might call in the Argentinian summer or
| 70F South Texas winter weather is not going to gain
| confidence when Fred tries to build rapport through some
| small talk about the unseasonably cold weather...
| direwolf20 wrote:
| > Fred is here
|
| Ah, they've created SCP-423
| greedo wrote:
| And I'm sure a farmer who's already busy is going to
| waste his time on a five acre lot. Hell, the yield on
| such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be
| terrible. I'm sure there's a dollar amount that would
| motivate someone, but at a profitable rate, not a chance
| in hell.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| what is Bill Gates wanting to do with Iowa farm land?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Collect rent.
|
| That's all rich people do. The premise of capitalism is that
| the people best at collecting rent should also be in total
| control of resource allocation.
| 93po wrote:
| i would guess it's less about rent seeking and more about
| him making a bet on safe places to store billions of
| dollars. there's a lot of economic collapse that can happen
| where farm land remains valuable in a way that housing
| stock, office buildings, or MSFT stock wouldn't
| malfist wrote:
| Same as any other big real estate investor: speculate.
| bluGill wrote:
| Bill gates is one of the largest farmland owners in the world
| (or at least was - I last checked about 10 years ago...) He
| hires people to work on his farm, and managers to manage it.
| Food is the most important thing for modern society and the
| reports I have suggest he is trying to raise food in the most
| sustainable fashion possible (organic is often not
| sustainable)
| pixl97 wrote:
| Hello. Ex-Iowegian here with family that owns large farms.
|
| >Farmers are already using computers to guide decisions.
|
| For way longer than most people expect. I remember reading
| farming magazines in the 80's showing computer based control
| for all kinds of farming operations. These days it is
| exceptionally high tech. Combines measure yield on a GPS grid.
| This is fed back into a mapping system for fertilization and
| soil amendment in the spring to reduce costs where you don't
| need to put fertilizer. The tractors themselves do most of the
| driving themselves if you choose to get those packages added.
| You can get services that monitor storm damage and predict
| losses on your fields, and updated satellite feed information
| on growth patterns, soil moisture, vegetation loss, and more.
| Simply put super high automation is already available for
| farming. I tell my uncle his job is to make sure the tractor
| has diesel in it, and that nothing is jammed in the plow.
|
| When it comes to animal farming in the mid-west, a huge portion
| of it is done by contracts with other companies. My uncle owns
| the land and provides the labor, but the buildings, birds,
| food, and any other supplies. A faceless company setting up the
| contract like now, or an AI sending the same paperwork really
| may not look too much different.
| omnicognate wrote:
| > Coordinates human operators
|
| "Thinking quickly, Dave constructs a homemade megaphone, using
| only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone."
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| AI CEOs are coming.
| futuraperdita wrote:
| AI middle managers are coming. The highest-level corporate
| authority can and will continue to exist as a person that makes
| sure the AI systems are running correctly and skim profits off
| the top of the AI substructure, with the lowest stratum being
| an underclass precariat doing the hands-on tickets from an AI
| agent at a continuously adjusted market price for the task.
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| It could be just an owner or a board or directors at the top.
| It's possible the CEO will be automated for some companies.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| It's...interesting but I feel like people keep forgetting that
| LLMs like Claude don't really...think(?). Or learn. Or know what
| 'corn' or a 'tractor' is. They don't really have any memory of
| past experiences or a working memory of some current state.
|
| They're (very impressive) next word predictors. If you ask it 'is
| it time to order more seeds?' and the internet is full of someone
| answering 'no' - that's the answer it will provide. It can't
| actually understand how many there currently are, the season, how
| much land, etc, and do the math itself to determine whether it's
| actually needed or not.
|
| You can babysit it and engineer the prompts to be as leading as
| possible to the answer you want it to give - but that's about it.
| jablongo wrote:
| I think you could have credibly said this for a while during
| 2024 and earlier, but there is a lot of research that indicates
| LLMs are more than stochastic parrots, as some researchers
| claimed earlier on. Souped up versions of LLMs have performed
| at the gold medal level in the IMO, which should give you pause
| in dismissing them. "It can't actually understand how many
| there currently are, the season, how much land, etc, and do the
| math itself to determine whether it's actually needed or not"
| --- modern agents actually can do this.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| They are 100% stochastic parrots.
|
| The worlds most impressive stochastic parrot, resulting from
| billions of dollars of research by some of the world's most
| advanced mathematicians and computer scientists.
|
| And capable of some very impressive things. But pretending
| their limitations don't exist doesn't serve anyone.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I'm waiting for the "Can it do Management?" experiment.
|
| I do not have a positive impression/experience of most middle/low
| level management in corporate world. Over 30 years in the
| workforce, I've watched it evolve to a "secretary/clerk, usually
| male, who agrees to be responsible for something they know little
| about or not very good at doing, pretend at orchestrating".
|
| Like growing corn, lots of literature has been written about it.
| So models have lots to work with and synthesize. Why not automate
| the meetings and metric gatherings and mindless hallucinations
| and short sighted decisions that drone-ish be-like-the-other-
| manager people do?
| serhack_ wrote:
| choice = random() % 5 switch choice:
| case 0: blog_post case 1: tell_to_plant_corn
| case 2: register_website case 3: pause
| case 4: move_money
| Spoom wrote:
| > AI doesn't need to drive a tractor. It needs to orchestrate the
| systems and people who do.
|
| I've been rather expecting AI to start acting as a manager with
| people as its arms in the real world. It reminds me of the Manna
| short story[1], where it acts as a people manager with perfect
| intelligence at all times, interconnected not only with every
| system but also with other instances in other companies (e.g. for
| competitive wage data to minimize opex / pay).
|
| 1. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Yeah I came here to post this. This is the other thing we're
| going to see. And it doesn't have to be perfect to orchestrate
| people, it just has to be mediocre or better and it will be
| better than 50% of humans.
| pragmatic wrote:
| But "AI" already does drive the tractor/combine/sprayer etc.
|
| Look up precision ag.
| FuturisticLover wrote:
| I am not sure how it different than what we do with llms on daily
| basis.
|
| We feed it the information as a context to help us make a plan or
| strategy to achieve or get something.
|
| They are also doing the same. They will be feeding the sensor,
| weather and other info, so claude can give them plan to execute.
|
| Ultimately, they need to execute everything.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| You can lease 5 acres in Iowa for $1370? Per month I guess? In
| which case it will be $1370 * m. Not clear from here:
| https://proofofcorn.com/
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| A quick search of actual data shows that farmland suitable for
| row crops sells for ~$11k per acre so a 5 acre area would be
| around $55k. If the market rate for that type of land was
| $1,370 per month, that comes to a rate of return near 30%
| yearly (assuming leases are yearly, not seasonal)![0]
|
| I dug a little deeper and found this study showing cash rental
| rates per acre per year ranging from $215 to $295.[1] So it
| actually looks like Claude got this one right.
|
| Of course I know nothing about renting farmland, but if you ask
| to rent 5 acres the average farm size is in 300+ acre region,
| the land owners might tell you to get lost or pony up. A little
| bit like asking Amazon to give you enterprise rates for a
| single small EC2 instance.
|
| [0] https://farmland.card.iastate.edu/overview [1]
| https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/pdf/c2-10.p...
| jollyllama wrote:
| See also: King Corn [0] - in which two random guys try to grow an
| acre of corn and learn about industrialized agriculture in the
| proces.
|
| [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/
| programd wrote:
| See also: Clarkson's Farm [0], for some of the messy reality of
| running an actual modern farm in England (though edited for
| entertainment value). I suspect the current AIs are not quite
| up to doing this - but I firmly beleive it's only a matter of
| time.
|
| [0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10541088/
| nxobject wrote:
| Given how the front page's ASCII diagram is misaligned on my
| browser, I think I have a few concerns about factors that might
| lead to, well, oversights...
| dieggsy wrote:
| Ha! I was going to disagree, but then I realized I force most
| monospace html entities to use a specific font in my browser
| (using a wildcard stylus stylesheet). This is quite nice to
| normalize things (and sidestep atrocious font choices)
| actually.
|
| Anyway, turned it off; sure enough, misaligned.
| japoneris wrote:
| Similar to the growing tomato stuff with claude
| https://x.com/d33v33d0/status/2006221407340867881 Your project
| seems more achieved !
| orange_joe wrote:
| contra-pessimism: My parents run a small organic farm on the east
| coast -- (greenhouses, not row crops) and they extensively use
| chatgpt for decision making They obviously haven't built out
| agentic data gathering, but can easily prompt it with the
| required information. they're quite happy with everything.
|
| I'm guessing this will screw up in assuming infinite labor &
| equipment liqudity.
| dsr_ wrote:
| So... the only job that LLM can replace in the chain here is CEO.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| HN type "about the website itself, not it's content" comment but
| ... it would be great if we could somehow get the major browser
| vendors to agree on some monospaced fonts. I'm on M1 Mac and the
| small ASCII diagram, nothing lines up (Safari/Firefox/Chrome). I
| see this on many ASCII diagrams. Maybe that's the site's fault.
| Not sure)
| snackbroken wrote:
| The diagram looks correct for me when I disable CSS on the page
| or edit it's font-family to be "monospace". Seems like Geist
| Mono might just be borked.
| itsafarqueue wrote:
| Slop.
|
| I have zero doubt Claude is going to do what AI does and plough
| forward. Emails will get sent, recommendations made, stuff done.
|
| And it will be slop. Worse than what it does with code, the
| outcomes of which are highly correlated with the expertise of the
| user past a certain point.
|
| Seth wins his point. AI can, via humans giving it permission to
| do things, affect the world. So can my chaos monkey random
| script.
|
| Fred should have qualified: _usefully_ affect the world. Deliver
| a margin of Utility.
|
| We're miles off that high bar.
|
| Disclosure: all in on AI
| starkparker wrote:
| If this is a joke, it's a bad one. If it's not, it's even dumber.
|
| The point could be made by having it design and print implements
| for an indoor container grow and then run lights and water over a
| microcontroller. Like Anthropic's vending machine this would also
| be an already addressed, if not solved, space for both home
| manufacturing and ag/garden automation.
|
| It'd still be novel to see an LLM figure it out from scratch step
| by step, and a hell of a lot more interesting than whatever the
| fuck this is. Googling farmland in Iowa or Texas and then writing
| instructions for people to do the actual work isn't novel or
| interesting; of course an LLM can write and fill out forms. But
| the end result still primarily relies on people to execute those
| forms and affect the world, invalidating the point. Growing corn
| would be interesting, project managing corn isn't.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| "Can AI grow corn?"
|
| Let's step back.
|
| "there's a gap between digital and physical that AI can't cross"
|
| Can intelligence of ANY kind, artificial or natural, grow corn?
| Do physical things?
|
| Your brain is trapped in its skull. How does it do anything
| physical?
|
| With nerves, of course. Connected to muscle. It's sending and
| receiving signals, that's all its doing! The brain isn't actually
| doing anything!
|
| The history of humanity's last 300k years tells you that
| intelligence makes a difference, even though it isn't doing
| anything but receiving and sending signals.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| It's extremely funny to me but this is basically the literal
| premise of season two of Person of Interest. Yeah d'uh it's
| just a computer _how would it actually do anything_? Well it
| just goes ahead and tells people to do stuff and wires them
| money. Easy.
| Windchaser wrote:
| Though a computer could also just control robots that
| actually plant, weed, water, and harvest the corn. That's a
| pretty big difference from just 'coordinating' the work.
|
| An AI that can also plant corn itself (via robots it
| controls) is much more impressive to me than an AI just send
| emails.
| downboots wrote:
| the corn seed is a program source file
| drhodes wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. And further still, handle the assembly and
| manufacturing up the supply chain; like factorio.
| recursive wrote:
| I can't tell which side you're arguing here. But if the AI was
| strapped onto a roomba that rolled around and planted, watered
| and harvested the corn, _I_ would count that.
| esafak wrote:
| That looks like a lot of work with little payoff for a bar bet.
| I'd have said "Sure, Fred, whatever you say."
| recursive wrote:
| Probably what Fred should have said in the first place.
| fhennig wrote:
| Lol, the farmer also doesn't grow corn, their workers in the
| fields do.
| recursive wrote:
| This is still just going to be hiring someone else to grow corn,
| but with extra steps. The AI part seems kind of slapped-on here.
| ranprieur wrote:
| > AI doesn't need to drive a tractor. It needs to orchestrate the
| systems and people who do.
|
| Pure dystopia.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| What work DO you want the humans to do?
|
| The endless complaining and goalposting shifting is exhausting
| qayxc wrote:
| The people already doing this work today already do exactly
| that.
|
| There's no goalpost shifting here - it's l'art pour l'art at
| its finest. It'd be introducing an agent where no additional
| agent agent is required in the first place, i.e. telling a
| farmer how to do their job, when they already now how to and
| do it in the first place.
|
| No one needs an LLM if you can just lease some land and then
| tell some person to tend to it, (i.e. doing the actual work).
| It's baffling to me how out of touch with reality some people
| are.
|
| Want to grow corn? Take some corn, put it in the ground in
| your backyard and harvest when it's ready. Been there, done
| that, not a challenge at all. Want to do it at scale? Lease
| some land, buy some corn, contract a farmer to till the land,
| sow the corn, and eventually harvest it. Done. No LLM
| required. No further knowledge required. Want to know when
| the best time for each step is? Just look at when other
| farmers in the area are doing it. Done.
| lbrito wrote:
| This is lopsided. Technology promised to remove drudgery from our
| lives, and now we're seeing experiments that automate all the
| easy, air-conditioned decision making while still delegating the
| toil to humans
|
| Unequivocally awful
| dsjoerg wrote:
| You've told the humans:
|
| "Stop staring at screens"
|
| "Stop sitting at your desk all day"
|
| "Stop loafing around contributing nothing just sending orders
| from behind a computer"
|
| "Touch grass"
|
| but now that the humans are finally gonna get out and DO
| something you're outraged
| lbrito wrote:
| So the choice is either stare into screens the whole day or
| be bossed by an AI doing manual labor? Is that a serious
| argument?
| incr_me wrote:
| Awful indeed! Turns out most of our jobs have consisted of
| easy, air-conditioned decision making. We're going to have to
| find another secret handshake with productive capitalists if we
| want to ensure our continued allotment of the spoils of global
| exploitation of the toilers.
| lupire wrote:
| Technology has already replaced 90% of the human work in
| agriculture. That's why you live in a city.
|
| The remaining work is only bad because it's low paying, and
| it's low paying because the wealth created by machines is
| unfairly distributed.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| This actually is a good summary of my theory of AI. The best use
| case for AI is replacing management. Thats the real reason AI is
| floundering right now with making money. The people in charge
| would literally need to admit that they are basically no longer
| needed and act accordingly.
|
| This of course will never happens so instead those in power will
| continue to try to shoehorn AI into making slaves which is what
| they want, but not the ideal usage for AI.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| I can make corn too. I go to the supermarket and hand them these
| little green pieces of paper, and then I have corn.
|
| Seriously, what does this prove? The AI isn't actually doing
| anything, it's just online shopping basically. You're just going
| to end up paying grocery store prices for agricultural quantities
| of corn.
| solomonb wrote:
| The Corn Demon is alive and well in 2026.
| bradgranath wrote:
| This is the literal definition of a Reverse Centaur.
|
| https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/
| guerrilla wrote:
| Looks like proof of cheating to me, at least for now. Definitely
| a step in an interesting direction, but not exactly SkyNet.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| This isn't really an impressive test; growing corn is an
| extremely well-documented solved problem, the sort of thing that
| we already know LLMs excel at. An LLM that couldn't reliably tell
| you what to do at each step of the corn-farming process would be
| a very poor LLM.
|
| This seems like something along the lines of "We know we can use
| Excel to calculate profit/loss for a Mexican restaurant, but will
| it work for a Tibetan-Indonesian fusion restaurant? Nobody's ever
| done that before!"
| aaln wrote:
| Really cool - even cooler if some farming related hardware on a
| designated plot of land can be setup so it's more than an ai
| agent finding someone to hire via apis.
| ks2048 wrote:
| "Every decision will be logged. Every API call documented." ...
|
| So, where are the exact logs of the prompts and responses to
| Claude? Under "/log" I do not see this.
| snowmobile wrote:
| Remember the website is entirely AI-built; it's not surprising
| it's promising a bunch of stuff it's not actually delivering.
| jdwg wrote:
| Is it easy to make money by growing corn? Probably not.
|
| So this is a very legitimate test. We may learn some interesting
| ways that planting, growing, harvesting, storing, and selling
| corn can go wrong.
|
| I certainly wouldn't expect to make money on my first or second
| try!
| ironbound wrote:
| Commanding a bunch of twitch streamers, seem a lower entry cost
| for this test
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IflNUap2HME
| lupire wrote:
| The perpetual motion machine is only interesting of it generates
| more energy than you put in.
| Alupis wrote:
| I can't be the only person seriously questioning the "Budget"
| page the AI created?[1]
|
| The estimate seems to leave out a lot of factors, including
| irrigation, machinery, the literal seeds, and more. $800 for a
| "custom operator" for 7 months - I don't believe it. Leasing 5
| acres of farmable land (for presumably a year) for less than
| $1400... I don't believe it.
|
| The humans behind this experiment are going to get very tired of
| reading "Oh, you're right..." over and over - and likely end up
| deeply underwater.
|
| [1] https://proofofcorn.com/budget
| jackmarshl0w wrote:
| I find it intresting if the AI can Produce real Corn on other
| planet. If this work, i think when AI is getting resource of
| other planet soil, then it going to be a great help for Humanity
| eisbaw wrote:
| I thought this was another joke from https://cornhub.website/
| ikidd wrote:
| As a full-on farmer, the idea of Claude making the decisions on
| our farm of several thousand acres gives me the willies. I
| program with Claude and I don't trust it to write a test script
| without vetting it thoroughly and fixing a couple things before
| running it.
|
| Betting millions of dollars in capital on it's decision making
| process for something it wasn't even designed for and is way more
| complicated than even I believed coming from a software
| background into farming is patently ludicrous.
|
| And 5 acres is a garden. I doubt he'll even find a plot to rent
| at that size, especially this close to seeding in that area.
| tw04 wrote:
| "A farm coordinator doesn't plant every seed"
|
| Huh? I have no doubt that mega corporate farms have a "farm
| manager", but I can tell you having grown up in small town
| America, that's just not a thing. My buddies dad's were "farm
| manager", and absolutely planted every seed of corn (until the
| boys were old enough to drive the tractor and then it was split
| duty), and the big farms also harvested their own and the smaller
| ones hired it out.
|
| So unless claude is planning on learning to drive a tractor it's
| going to be a pretty useless task manager telling a farmer to do
| something he or she was already planning on doing.
| fanatic2pope wrote:
| > When _we_ harvest corn in October...
|
| We, as in humans?
| chakazula wrote:
| But how will it lobby the federal government to guarantee
| returns?
| mbowcut2 wrote:
| It's an interesting concept, but I'm skeptical about how feasible
| this is. How much design/legwork/intervention will Seth actually
| contribute during the entire process? I'm thinking "growing corn"
| might be a little hard for a proof of concept, specifically
| because the time horizon is quite long. Something a little more
| short term like: contracting a landscaping job. The model comes
| up with design ideas, contacts landscapers, gets bids, accepts a
| bid. Seth could tell the model that he's it's agent, available to
| sign for things, walk people through the property, etc, but will
| make no decisions, and is only reachable by email or text.
| farmin wrote:
| I reckon producing corn in the Midwest would be the most
| researched and documented crop and location ever in history. So
| baked into an LLM should be some very good knowledge and
| assumptions. Growing a different crop elsewhere may be more
| challenging.
| tleyden5iwx wrote:
| Can they change the name to Proof Of Corncept?
| lerp-io wrote:
| so cringe
| paxys wrote:
| "AI can't grow corn."
|
| "Hey AI, draft an email asking someone to grow corn. See, AI
| _can_ grow corn! "
|
| This project is neat in itself, sure, but I feel the author is
| wayyy missing the point of the original thought.
| dabinat wrote:
| Given that this is an experiment and the website says they want
| to treat Claude as a "true collaborator", they should follow the
| AI's directions EXACTLY. Claude alone should make decisions and
| no human should be allowed to deviate from its instructions, even
| if they know better. That's what would make this a valuable
| experiment, otherwise if there's a human moderating Claude then
| it's no better than Googling.
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