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".
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.
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.
>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.
What I'd like to see is an AI simulating the economy, so that we can make predictions of what happens if we decrease wealth tax by X% or increasy income tax by Y% (just examples).
Wouldn't actual proof to be valid need ability to send and receive email and transfer money?
Then it could do things like: "hey, do you have seeds? Send me pictures. I'll pay if I like them" or "I want to lease this land, I'll wire you the money." or "Seeds were delivered there, I need you to get your machinery and plant it"
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.
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?”
This is fair, but this seems like the only way to test this type of thing while avoiding the risk of harassing tons of farmers with AI emails. In the end, the performance will be judged on how much of a human harness is given
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
Of course software can affect the physical world: Google Maps changes traffic patterns; DoorDash teleports takeoff food right to my doorstep; the weather app alters how people dress. This list is un-ending. But these effects are always second-order. Humans are always there in the background bridging the gap between bits and atoms (underpaid delivery drivers in the case of doordash).
The more interesting question is whether AI can __directly__ impact the physical world with robotics. Gemini can wax poetic about optimizing fertilizers usage, grid spacing for best cross-pollination, the optimum temperature, timing, watering frequency of growing corn, but can it actually go to Home Depot, purchase corn seeds, ... (long sequence of tasks) ..., nurture it for months until there's corn in my backyard? Each task within the (long sequence of tasks) is "making PB&J sandwich" [1] level of difficulty. Can AI generalize?
As is, LLMs are better positioned to replace decision-makers than the workers actually getting stuff done.
I think the distinction between "directly" and "indirectly" affecting the world is meaningless. Say you're an Uber driver. What does the actual work? The car. You don't take people from A to B, your car does. You don't burn a thousand calories per mile, your car does.
Yet you get credited for all that work, because a car's ability to move people isn't special compared to your ability to operate it without running people over. Similarly, your ability to buy things from a store isn't special compared to an AI's ability to design a hydroponics farm or fusion reactor or whatever out of those things. Yes, you can do things the AI can't, but on the other hand, your car can do things you can't.
All this talk about "doing things in the physical world" is just another goalpost moving, and a really dumb one at that.
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?
>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."
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
Actually, the linked university page [1] does claim that the "cash rent equivalent" is $274 per acre. Surprising, but I suppose farmland isn't that expensive. But unfortunately their total budget per acre is $960, 90% higher than in the AI's "budget". Assuming that it can do everything as efficiently and cheaply as an experienced human farmer, such as harvesting all 5 acres in 14 hours of labor.
(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…)
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?
"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.
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.
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.
- Go buy seeds, plant them, water the field and once you gather the corn report back
- I'm back with the corn, proving AI can grow corn!
This is the experiment here, with nuance added to it. The thing is, though, if you "orchestrate" other people, you might as well do it with a single sentence as I described. Or you can manage more thoroughly. Some decisions you make may actually be detrimental to the end result.
So the only meaningful experiment would be to test a bot against a human being: who earns more money orchestrating the corn farm, a bot or a human? Consider also the expenses which is electricity/water for a bot and also food, medicine etc. for a human being.
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?
I don't know anything about farming, but the budget seems extremely dubious.
1370 on the lease, 350 on "IoT sensors" and "soil testing" (why?), but only 800 on "Custom Operator", which I'm assuming is supposed to be the labor, for seven months (apr-oct). So that's an average budget of 114 dollars on labor per month. For minimum wage that buys you 15 hours of work. Is this all a big trolling attempt aimed at HN users?
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.
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
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.
> 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).
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.
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!"
It would be impressive in the sense of "Can I ask AI to make me money, and it does so autonomously?", since that's just a free source of money (until other people do it better than you and with more capital). But looking at everything here, I'm dubious that the AI will be able to do that. Farming isn't that high of a margin business, and it's adding a lot of inefficiency and other issues (small acreage, unbelievably low amounts budgeted for labor and machinery, dubious plan for "IoT Sensor Kit", no budget for seeds, etc.).
It seems to me that the person driving the tractor already knows how to grow corn, and the guy behind the laptop typing prompts about corn is might as well be playing Candy Crush.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I have believed for a couple of years that AI could do a better job of managing farm crop marketing than the average farmer. It would remove the emotion involved in selling the crop.
Managing all the decisions in growing a crop is too far a reach. Maybe someday, not today. Way too many variables and unexpected issues. I'm a former fertilizer company agronomist and the problem is far harder than say self driving cars.
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.
I don’t see how this ever gets past the land phase. How does the AI know if the proposed land rental is fertile, farmable, accessible to vehicles, accessible to specific machinery, etc? Assuming a human intervenes here, I don’t see how you find an operator to get up to run a combine on 5 acres for the harvest. I’d have as much luck finding someone to do it on my backyard garden.
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.
The discussion is actually more funny than it would seem. Corn existed long before humans. We aren't required for growing corn, the corn grows all by it self. It's like saying I grow your hair after serving you a cup of your favorite tea. We do know what people refer to when they say they are growing corn. When AI grows the corn we also know what is referred to.
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.
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)
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.
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.
This is like the 4 World Supercomputers at the end of Asimov’s I, Robot. Humans do all the work (industry, agriculture, economy, etc) and then feed the data into the computers who orchestrate/tell humans what to do.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is highly ridiculous. It's missing entire categories of costs, not to mention selling 1000bu of corn is not easy and you won't get that price for it.
The real question isn't "Can AI do x thing?" but "SHOULD AI do x thing". We know how to grow and sell corn. There is zero that AI can do to make it more "efficient" than it already is.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
ppchain|1 month ago
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|1 month ago
lukev|1 month ago
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.
progval|1 month ago
jdthedisciple|1 month ago
tw04|1 month ago
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.
unknown|1 month ago
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amelius|1 month ago
ge96|1 month ago
varispeed|1 month ago
Then it could do things like: "hey, do you have seeds? Send me pictures. I'll pay if I like them" or "I want to lease this land, I'll wire you the money." or "Seeds were delivered there, I need you to get your machinery and plant it"
cyanydeez|1 month ago
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.
Oras|1 month ago
Then what you asked “do everything to grow …” would be a matter of “when?”, not “can?”
bogtog|1 month ago
fuzzer371|1 month ago
jmspring|1 month ago
riazrizvi|1 month ago
zeckalpha|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
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bodge5000|1 month ago
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.
lighthouse1212|1 month ago
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bluGill|1 month ago
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)
pixl97|1 month ago
>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.
Yeroc|1 month ago
bjt|1 month ago
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.
knowitnone3|1 month ago
wcfrobert|1 month ago
Of course software can affect the physical world: Google Maps changes traffic patterns; DoorDash teleports takeoff food right to my doorstep; the weather app alters how people dress. This list is un-ending. But these effects are always second-order. Humans are always there in the background bridging the gap between bits and atoms (underpaid delivery drivers in the case of doordash).
The more interesting question is whether AI can __directly__ impact the physical world with robotics. Gemini can wax poetic about optimizing fertilizers usage, grid spacing for best cross-pollination, the optimum temperature, timing, watering frequency of growing corn, but can it actually go to Home Depot, purchase corn seeds, ... (long sequence of tasks) ..., nurture it for months until there's corn in my backyard? Each task within the (long sequence of tasks) is "making PB&J sandwich" [1] level of difficulty. Can AI generalize?
As is, LLMs are better positioned to replace decision-makers than the workers actually getting stuff done.
[1] http://static.zerorobotics.mit.edu/docs/team-activities/Prog...
bsza|1 month ago
Yet you get credited for all that work, because a car's ability to move people isn't special compared to your ability to operate it without running people over. Similarly, your ability to buy things from a store isn't special compared to an AI's ability to design a hydroponics farm or fusion reactor or whatever out of those things. Yes, you can do things the AI can't, but on the other hand, your car can do things you can't.
All this talk about "doing things in the physical world" is just another goalpost moving, and a really dumb one at that.
northerdome|1 month ago
Propelloni|1 month ago
NedF|1 month ago
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jayd16|1 month ago
deejaaymac|1 month ago
nonethewiser|1 month ago
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."
kennywinker|1 month ago
roywiggins|1 month ago
treis|1 month ago
pfdietz|1 month ago
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."
bwestergard|1 month ago
fishtoaster|1 month ago
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.
bluGill|1 month ago
tootie|1 month ago
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
unknown|1 month ago
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unknown|1 month ago
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aprilthird2021|1 month ago
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
TheRealPomax|1 month ago
moolcool|1 month ago
Alupis|1 month ago
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
snowmobile|1 month ago
[1] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/html/a1-20.html
etamponi|1 month ago
I am extremely worried by the amount of hype I see around. I hope I am being in a bubble.
deathanatos|1 month ago
(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|1 month ago
omnicognate|1 month ago
"Thinking quickly, Dave constructs a homemade megaphone, using only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone."
divbzero|1 month ago
To make this a full AI experiment, emails to this inbox should be fielded by Claude as well.
DoctorOW|1 month ago
dsjoerg|1 month ago
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.
recursive|1 month ago
formerly_proven|1 month ago
kitsune1|1 month ago
[deleted]
Etherlord87|1 month ago
- Yes it can
- Prove it
- AI, tell me instructions to grow corn
- Go buy seeds, plant them, water the field and once you gather the corn report back
- I'm back with the corn, proving AI can grow corn!
This is the experiment here, with nuance added to it. The thing is, though, if you "orchestrate" other people, you might as well do it with a single sentence as I described. Or you can manage more thoroughly. Some decisions you make may actually be detrimental to the end result.
So the only meaningful experiment would be to test a bot against a human being: who earns more money orchestrating the corn farm, a bot or a human? Consider also the expenses which is electricity/water for a bot and also food, medicine etc. for a human being.
nvader|1 month ago
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?
FarmerPotato|1 month ago
--Hammurabi
snowmobile|1 month ago
tsunamifury|1 month ago
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.
lbrito|1 month ago
Unequivocally awful
lupire|1 month ago
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.
incr_me|1 month ago
dsjoerg|1 month ago
"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
Spoom|1 month ago
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|1 month ago
CommieBobDole|1 month ago
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!"
gbear605|1 month ago
ranprieur|1 month ago
Pure dystopia.
moolcool|1 month ago
dsjoerg|1 month ago
The endless complaining and goalposting shifting is exhausting
orange_joe|1 month ago
I’m guessing this will screw up in assuming infinite labor & equipment liqudity.
japoneris|1 month ago
mbowcut2|1 month ago
travisgriggs|1 month ago
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?
ikidd|1 month ago
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.
ks2048|1 month ago
So, where are the exact logs of the prompts and responses to Claude? Under "/log" I do not see this.
snowmobile|1 month ago
rmason|1 month ago
Managing all the decisions in growing a crop is too far a reach. Maybe someday, not today. Way too many variables and unexpected issues. I'm a former fertilizer company agronomist and the problem is far harder than say self driving cars.
citizenpaul|1 month ago
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.
cityofdelusion|1 month ago
dabinat|1 month ago
6510|1 month ago
eisbaw|1 month ago
starkparker|1 month ago
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.
socalgal2|1 month ago
snackbroken|1 month ago
tiffanyh|1 month ago
This is all addressed in the original blog post.
https://avc.xyz/can-ai-grow-corn
https://proofofcorn.com/story
recursive|1 month ago
stephantul|1 month ago
jovial_cavalier|1 month ago
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.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
FuturisticLover|1 month ago
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.
jdwg|1 month ago
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!
bradgranath|1 month ago
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/
meroes|1 month ago
pragmatic|1 month ago
Look up precision ag.
nonethewiser|1 month ago
dghlsakjg|1 month ago
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...
ironbound|1 month ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IflNUap2HME
serhack_|1 month ago
aaln|1 month ago
nxobject|1 month ago
dieggsy|1 month ago
Anyway, turned it off; sure enough, misaligned.
space_greg|1 month ago
https://autonomousforest.org/map
Kkoala|1 month ago
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
fanatic2pope|1 month ago
We, as in humans?
guerrilla|1 month ago
esafak|1 month ago
recursive|1 month ago
joelthelion|1 month ago
solomonb|1 month ago
wartywhoa23|1 month ago
Such a nice term to use as an AI-related alternative to "jump the shark".
I'll definitely be using.
pier25|1 month ago
tw04|1 month ago
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.
MetaMonk|1 month ago
paxys|1 month ago
"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.
lupire|1 month ago
itsafarqueue|1 month ago
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
fhennig|1 month ago
recursive|1 month ago
chakazula|1 month ago
dsr_|1 month ago
jrflowers|1 month ago
581 points 342 comments
tpolm|1 month ago
jollyllama|1 month ago
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/
programd|1 month ago
[0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10541088/
bstsb|1 month ago
naveed125|1 month ago
jpmattia|1 month ago
I mean, more or less, but you see what I'm getting at.
kennywinker|1 month ago
Most food is picked by migrant laborers, not machines.
tleyden5iwx|1 month ago
a3w|1 month ago
silveira|1 month ago
huslage|1 month ago
The real question isn't "Can AI do x thing?" but "SHOULD AI do x thing". We know how to grow and sell corn. There is zero that AI can do to make it more "efficient" than it already is.
Come on.
phyzome|1 month ago
BenoitEssiambre|1 month ago
futuraperdita|1 month ago
moffkalast|1 month ago
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.
corndoge|1 month ago
qoez|1 month ago
farmin|1 month ago
lerp-io|1 month ago
dh2424|1 month ago
undo-k|1 month ago
gritspants|1 month ago
Claude: Oh. My. God.
jackmarshl0w|1 month ago
CORNOSOL|1 month ago
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CORNOSOL|1 month ago
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corneater33|1 month ago
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Night_Thastus|1 month ago
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|1 month ago