9 ms·

Proof of Corn

476 points by rocauc 8mo ago

bstsb 8mo ago
somewhat related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311144
nvader 8mo ago
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?
- FarmerPotato 8mo ago
  21 people came to your city last year. 117 died of starvation. Rats ate 2651 bushels of corn. How many acres would you like to plant this year? --Hammurabi
divbzero 8mo ago
> 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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  There was no challenge. There was a statement, "AI can write code, but it can't affect the physical world."
  - kennywinker 8mo ago
    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.
    - TheRealPomax 8mo ago
      I didn't write the statement, nor did I waste time and money on this "experiment" when the US needs time and money spent on very different actions right now.
- bwestergard 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 :)
qoez 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  > Farmers traditionally employ machines to achieve their harvest Most food is picked by migrant laborers, not machines.
  - mvidal01 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
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 https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html )
- geuis 8mo ago
  That game is entirely too addictive especially at 3am.
jayd16 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  But harassing people is one of AI’s greatest strengths!
  - ge96 8mo ago
    brb doing a Clause master class talk at $500 a head
- deejaaymac 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
    Not sure how relevant that is but yeah, that sucks too.
    - LoganDark 8mo ago
      I think they're saying that businesses getting unsolicited offers from the LLM is similar to regular people getting unsolicited offers from businesses.
      - LunaSea 8mo ago
Kkoala 8mo ago
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
gritspants 8mo ago
Your job is to grow corn. Claude: Oh. My. God.
silveira 8mo ago
https://farm.bot/ https://farm.bot/ exists.
space_greg 8mo ago
Reminds me of this project from friends of mine: https://autonomousforest.org/map https://autonomousforest.org/map
ppchain 8mo ago
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".
- jdthedisciple 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    trying. until you can eat it, you're just fucking around.
    - LoganDark 8mo ago
      He's writing it down, so it's also science.
      - tekno45 8mo ago
        exactly, its science/research, until you can feed people its not really farming.
        pixl97 8mo ago
        >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?
moffkalast 8mo ago
> 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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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.
omnicognate 8mo ago
> Coordinates human operators "Thinking quickly, Dave constructs a homemade megaphone, using only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone."
BenoitEssiambre 8mo ago
AI CEOs are coming.
- futuraperdita 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
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_ 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
> 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 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- throwway120385 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
But "AI" already does drive the tractor/combine/sprayer etc. Look up precision ag.
FuturisticLover 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
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/ https://proofofcorn.com/
- dghlsakjg 8mo ago
  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 https://farmland.card.iastate.edu/overview [1] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/pdf/c2-10.pdf https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/pdf/c2-10.p...
jollyllama 8mo ago
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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/
- programd 8mo ago
  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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10541088/
nxobject 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
Similar to the growing tomato stuff with claude https://x.com/d33v33d0/status/2006221407340867881 https://x.com/d33v33d0/status/2006221407340867881 Your project seems more achieved !
orange_joe 8mo ago
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_ 8mo ago
So... the only job that LLM can replace in the chain here is CEO.
socalgal2 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
"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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      the corn seed is a program source file
    - drhodes 8mo ago
      Yes, absolutely. And further still, handle the assembly and manufacturing up the supply chain; like factorio.
    - hahahahhaah 8mo ago
      Read all the comments in this thread from farmers or farm-adjacent people.
esafak 8mo ago
That looks like a lot of work with little payoff for a bar bet. I'd have said "Sure, Fred, whatever you say."
- recursive 8mo ago
  Probably what Fred should have said in the first place.
fhennig 8mo ago
Lol, the farmer also doesn‘t grow corn, their workers in the fields do.
- recursive 8mo ago
  Do you think that farmer would fail to grow corn if he was challenged and tried to do it?
  - fhennig 8mo ago
    Not sure, but at least a human farmer has the potential capacity to do it. An LLM doesn't, that was the point I was trying to make. The important part is the stuff happening in the physical world.
recursive 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
> AI doesn't need to drive a tractor. It needs to orchestrate the systems and people who do. Pure dystopia.
- dsjoerg 8mo ago
  What work DO you want the humans to do? The endless complaining and goalposting shifting is exhausting
  - qayxc 8mo ago
    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.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- moolcool 8mo ago
  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.
lbrito 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
  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.
  - demorro 8mo ago
    Or they force us to close those hands into fists.
- lupire 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
The Corn Demon is alive and well in 2026.
bradgranath 8mo ago
This is the literal definition of a Reverse Centaur. https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/
guerrilla 8mo ago
Looks like proof of cheating to me, at least for now. Definitely a step in an interesting direction, but not exactly SkyNet.
CommieBobDole 8mo ago
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!"
- gbear605 8mo ago
  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.).
aaln 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
"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 8mo ago
  Remember the website is entirely AI-built; it's not surprising it's promising a bunch of stuff it's not actually delivering.
jdwg 8mo ago
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!
eisbaw 8mo ago
I thought this was another joke from https://cornhub.website/ https://cornhub.website/
ironbound 8mo ago
Commanding a bunch of twitch streamers, seem a lower entry cost for this test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IflNUap2HME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IflNUap2HME
lupire 8mo ago
The perpetual motion machine is only interesting of it generates more energy than you put in.
Alupis 8mo ago
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 https://proofofcorn.com/budget
- etamponi 8mo ago
  I hope the budget has been written by AI, so that we can take a shortcut and immediately answer the question "Can AI grow corn?" with a "No". I am extremely worried by the amount of hype I see around. I hope I am being in a bubble.
- snowmobile 8mo ago
  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. [1] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/html/a1-20.html https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/html/a1-20.html
jackmarshl0w 8mo ago
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
ikidd 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
“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 8mo ago
> When we harvest corn in October... We, as in humans?
chakazula 8mo ago
But how will it lobby the federal government to guarantee returns?
mbowcut2 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
Can they change the name to Proof Of Corncept?
lerp-io 8mo ago
so cringe
paxys 8mo ago
"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 8mo ago
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.
wcfrobert 8mo ago
This exercise is pointless. 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/ProgrammingPeanutButterAndJelly.pdf http://static.zerorobotics.mit.edu/docs/team-activities/Prog...
- Propelloni 8mo ago
  Exactly, the same reason why an online petition will not change a thing---boots on the ground, ie. demonstrators, will.
- bsza 8mo ago
  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.
- NedF 8mo ago
  [dead]
snowmobile 8mo ago
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?
dh2424 8mo ago
I hate this timeline
pier25 8mo ago
Wait... is this really about growing real physical corn? Where are the photos of the farm or land?
undo-k 8mo ago
This is so fucking stupid
MetaMonk 8mo ago
Proof of corncept was right there!
tpolm 8mo ago
Modern-day Turing test: AI receives $100,000 and must make $1m
tiffanyh 8mo ago
There’s a lot of questions in this thread about what constitutes AI “growing the corn” vs AI hiring someone else. This is all addressed in the original blog post. https://avc.xyz/can-ai-grow-corn https://avc.xyz/can-ai-grow-corn https://proofofcorn.com/story https://proofofcorn.com/story
meroes 8mo ago
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.
phyzome 8mo ago
Can't wait for this to fail hilariously, complete with legal troubles.
rmason 8mo ago
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.
naveed125 8mo ago
This is the kind of cool stuff i come here for
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
stephantul 8mo ago
The header line of the website (“this is our response”) makes it appear as if the experiment was already successful.
joelthelion 8mo ago
This is actually a difficult project for LLMs, because a single bad decision can ruin the whole harvest.
jrflowers 8mo ago
Man Buys Domain and Posts Plan to Talk to the Computer 581 points 342 comments
a3w 8mo ago
Nice proof of corncept for a New Economy.
corndoge 8mo ago
Yeah this rules
wartywhoa23 8mo ago
Proof of Corn. Such a nice term to use as an AI-related alternative to "jump the shark". I'll definitely be using.
huslage 8mo ago
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. Come on.
Etherlord87 8mo ago
- AI can grow corn - 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.
cityofdelusion 8mo ago
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.
6510 8mo ago
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.
CORNOSOL 8mo ago
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CORNOSOL 8mo ago
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corneater33 8mo ago
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476 points by rocauc 8mo ago

bstsb 8mo ago

somewhat related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311144

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?

FarmerPotato 8mo ago
21 people came to your city last year. 117 died of starvation. Rats ate 2651 bushels of corn. How many acres would you like to plant this year? --Hammurabi

divbzero 8mo ago

> 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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
There was no challenge. There was a statement, "AI can write code, but it can't affect the physical world."
- kennywinker 8mo ago
  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.
  - TheRealPomax 8mo ago
    I didn't write the statement, nor did I waste time and money on this "experiment" when the US needs time and money spent on very different actions right now.
bwestergard 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 :)

qoez 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
> Farmers traditionally employ machines to achieve their harvest Most food is picked by migrant laborers, not machines.
- mvidal01 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago

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 https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html )

geuis 8mo ago
That game is entirely too addictive especially at 3am.

jayd16 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
But harassing people is one of AI’s greatest strengths!
- ge96 8mo ago
  brb doing a Clause master class talk at $500 a head
deejaaymac 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
  Not sure how relevant that is but yeah, that sucks too.
  - LoganDark 8mo ago
    I think they're saying that businesses getting unsolicited offers from the LLM is similar to regular people getting unsolicited offers from businesses.
    - LunaSea 8mo ago

Kkoala 8mo ago

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

gritspants 8mo ago

Your job is to grow corn. Claude: Oh. My. God.

silveira 8mo ago

https://farm.bot/ https://farm.bot/ exists.

space_greg 8mo ago

Reminds me of this project from friends of mine: https://autonomousforest.org/map https://autonomousforest.org/map

ppchain 8mo ago

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".

jdthedisciple 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  trying. until you can eat it, you're just fucking around.
  - LoganDark 8mo ago
    He's writing it down, so it's also science.
    - tekno45 8mo ago
      exactly, its science/research, until you can feed people its not really farming.
      - pixl97 8mo ago
        >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?

moffkalast 8mo ago

> 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 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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.

omnicognate 8mo ago

> Coordinates human operators "Thinking quickly, Dave constructs a homemade megaphone, using only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone."

BenoitEssiambre 8mo ago

AI CEOs are coming.

futuraperdita 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago

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_ 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

> 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 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

throwway120385 8mo ago
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 8mo ago

But "AI" already does drive the tractor/combine/sprayer etc. Look up precision ag.

FuturisticLover 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

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/ https://proofofcorn.com/

dghlsakjg 8mo ago
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 https://farmland.card.iastate.edu/overview [1] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/pdf/c2-10.pdf https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/pdf/c2-10.p...

jollyllama 8mo ago

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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/

programd 8mo ago
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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10541088/

nxobject 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago

Similar to the growing tomato stuff with claude https://x.com/d33v33d0/status/2006221407340867881 https://x.com/d33v33d0/status/2006221407340867881 Your project seems more achieved !

orange_joe 8mo ago

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_ 8mo ago

So... the only job that LLM can replace in the chain here is CEO.

socalgal2 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

"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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    the corn seed is a program source file
  - drhodes 8mo ago
    Yes, absolutely. And further still, handle the assembly and manufacturing up the supply chain; like factorio.
  - hahahahhaah 8mo ago
    Read all the comments in this thread from farmers or farm-adjacent people.

esafak 8mo ago

That looks like a lot of work with little payoff for a bar bet. I'd have said "Sure, Fred, whatever you say."

recursive 8mo ago
Probably what Fred should have said in the first place.

fhennig 8mo ago

Lol, the farmer also doesn‘t grow corn, their workers in the fields do.

recursive 8mo ago
Do you think that farmer would fail to grow corn if he was challenged and tried to do it?
- fhennig 8mo ago
  Not sure, but at least a human farmer has the potential capacity to do it. An LLM doesn't, that was the point I was trying to make. The important part is the stuff happening in the physical world.

recursive 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

> AI doesn't need to drive a tractor. It needs to orchestrate the systems and people who do. Pure dystopia.

dsjoerg 8mo ago
What work DO you want the humans to do? The endless complaining and goalposting shifting is exhausting
- qayxc 8mo ago
  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.
- deleted 8mo ago
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moolcool 8mo ago
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.

lbrito 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
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.
- demorro 8mo ago
  Or they force us to close those hands into fists.
lupire 8mo ago
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 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

The Corn Demon is alive and well in 2026.

bradgranath 8mo ago

This is the literal definition of a Reverse Centaur. https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

guerrilla 8mo ago

Looks like proof of cheating to me, at least for now. Definitely a step in an interesting direction, but not exactly SkyNet.

CommieBobDole 8mo ago

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!"

gbear605 8mo ago
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.).

aaln 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

"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 8mo ago
Remember the website is entirely AI-built; it's not surprising it's promising a bunch of stuff it's not actually delivering.

jdwg 8mo ago

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!

eisbaw 8mo ago

I thought this was another joke from https://cornhub.website/ https://cornhub.website/

ironbound 8mo ago

Commanding a bunch of twitch streamers, seem a lower entry cost for this test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IflNUap2HME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IflNUap2HME

lupire 8mo ago

The perpetual motion machine is only interesting of it generates more energy than you put in.

Alupis 8mo ago

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 https://proofofcorn.com/budget

etamponi 8mo ago
I hope the budget has been written by AI, so that we can take a shortcut and immediately answer the question "Can AI grow corn?" with a "No". I am extremely worried by the amount of hype I see around. I hope I am being in a bubble.
snowmobile 8mo ago
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. [1] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/html/a1-20.html https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/html/a1-20.html

jackmarshl0w 8mo ago

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

ikidd 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

“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 8mo ago

> When we harvest corn in October... We, as in humans?

chakazula 8mo ago

But how will it lobby the federal government to guarantee returns?

mbowcut2 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

Can they change the name to Proof Of Corncept?

lerp-io 8mo ago

so cringe

paxys 8mo ago

"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 8mo ago

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.

wcfrobert 8mo ago

This exercise is pointless. 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/ProgrammingPeanutButterAndJelly.pdf http://static.zerorobotics.mit.edu/docs/team-activities/Prog...

Propelloni 8mo ago
Exactly, the same reason why an online petition will not change a thing---boots on the ground, ie. demonstrators, will.
bsza 8mo ago
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.
NedF 8mo ago
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snowmobile 8mo ago

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?

dh2424 8mo ago

I hate this timeline

pier25 8mo ago

Wait... is this really about growing real physical corn? Where are the photos of the farm or land?

undo-k 8mo ago

This is so fucking stupid

MetaMonk 8mo ago

Proof of corncept was right there!

tpolm 8mo ago

Modern-day Turing test: AI receives $100,000 and must make $1m

tiffanyh 8mo ago

There’s a lot of questions in this thread about what constitutes AI “growing the corn” vs AI hiring someone else. This is all addressed in the original blog post. https://avc.xyz/can-ai-grow-corn https://avc.xyz/can-ai-grow-corn https://proofofcorn.com/story https://proofofcorn.com/story

meroes 8mo ago

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.

phyzome 8mo ago

Can't wait for this to fail hilariously, complete with legal troubles.

rmason 8mo ago

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.

naveed125 8mo ago

This is the kind of cool stuff i come here for

deleted 8mo ago

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stephantul 8mo ago

The header line of the website (“this is our response”) makes it appear as if the experiment was already successful.

joelthelion 8mo ago

This is actually a difficult project for LLMs, because a single bad decision can ruin the whole harvest.

jrflowers 8mo ago

Man Buys Domain and Posts Plan to Talk to the Computer 581 points 342 comments

a3w 8mo ago

Nice proof of corncept for a New Economy.

corndoge 8mo ago

Yeah this rules

wartywhoa23 8mo ago

Proof of Corn. Such a nice term to use as an AI-related alternative to "jump the shark". I'll definitely be using.

huslage 8mo ago

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. Come on.

Etherlord87 8mo ago

- AI can grow corn - 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.

cityofdelusion 8mo ago

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.

6510 8mo ago

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.

CORNOSOL 8mo ago

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CORNOSOL 8mo ago

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corneater33 8mo ago

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