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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

• 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?
    • nonethewiser 8mo ago
      Thats not the point of the original commenter. The point of the original commenter is that he expects Claude can inform him well enough to be a farm manager and its not impressive since Seth is the primary agent. I think it is impressive if it works. Like I mentioned in a sibling comment I think it already definitely proves something LLMs have accomplished though, and that is giving people tremendous confidence to try things.
      • cubano 8mo ago
        > I think it is impressive if it works. It only works if you tell Claude..."grow me some fucking corn profitably and have it ready in 9 months" and it does it. If it's being used as manager to simply flesh out the daily commands that someone is telling it, well then that isn't "working" thats just a new level of what we already have with APIs and crap.
        • nonethewiser 8mo ago
          It's working if it enables him to do it when he otherwise couldn't without significantly more time, energy, etc.
  • nonethewiser 8mo ago
    1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to bootstrap becoming a farmer 2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident. The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to act. You even see it with basic emails. Myself included. I'm just writing a simple email at work. But I can feed it into AI and make some minor edits to make it feel like my own words and I can just dispense with worries about "am i giving too much info, not enough, using the right tone, being unnecessarily short or overly greating, etc." And its not that the LLMs are necessarily even an authority on these factors - it simply bypasses the process (writing) which triggers these thoughts.
    • kokanee 8mo ago
      I started to write a logical rebuttal, but forget it. This is just so dumb. A guy is paying farmers to farm for him, and using a chatbot to Google everything he doesn't know about farming along the way. You're all brainwashed.
      • nonethewiser 8mo ago
        What specifically are you disagreeing with? I dont think its trivial for someone with no farming experience to successfully farm something within a year. >A guy is paying farmers to farm for him Read up on farming. The labor is not the complicated part. Managing resources, including telling the labor what to do, when, and how is the complicated part. There is a lot of decision making to manage uncertainty which will make or break you.
        • kokanee 8mo ago
          [dead]
        • AlotOfReading 8mo ago
          We should probably differentiate between trying to run a profitable farm, and producing any amount of yield. They're not really the same thing at all. I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money. Running a profitable farm is quite difficult though. There's an entire ecosystem connecting prospective farmers with money and limited skills/interest to people with the skills to properly operate it, either independently (tenant farmers) or as farm managers so the hobby owner can participate. Institutional investors prefer the former, and Jeremy Clarkson's farm show is a good example of the latter.
  • culi 8mo ago
    Nobody is denying that this is AI-enabled but that's entirely different from "AI can grow corn". Also Seth a non-farmer was already capable of using Google, online forums, and Sci-Hub/Libgen to access farming-related literature before LLMs came on the scene. In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. A great and useful technology, sure. But we're not utilizing any entirely novel capabilities here And tbh until we take a good crack at World Models I doubt we can
    • NewsaHackO 8mo ago
      I think is that a lot of professional work is not about entirely novel capabilities either, most professionals get the major revenue from bread and butter cases that apply already known solutions to custom problems. For instance, a surgeon taking out an appendix is not doing a novel approach to the problem every time.
    • onion2k 8mo ago
      In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. It isn't, because that implies getting everything necessary in a single action, as if there are high quality webpages that give a good answer to each prompt. There aren't. At the very least Claude must be searching, evaluating the results, and collating the data in finds from multiple results into a single cohesive response. There could be some agentic actions that cause it to perform further searches if it doesn't evaluate the data to a sufficiently high quality response. "It's just a super-charged search engine" ignores a lot of nuance about the difference between LLMs and search engines.
      • hnaccount_rng 8mo ago
        I think we are pretty much past the "LLMs are useless" phase, right? But I think "super-charged search engine" is a reasonably well fitting description. Like a search engine, it provides its user with information. Yes, it is (in a crude simplified description) better at that. Both in terms of completeness (you get a more "thoughtful" follow up) as well as in finding what you are looking for when you are not yet speaking the language. But that's not what OP was contesting. The statement "$LLM is _doing_ $STUFF in the real world" is far less correct than the characterisation as "super-charged search engine". Because - at least as far as I'm aware - every real-world interaction had required consent from humans. This story including
  • tjr 8mo ago
    I would say that Seth is farming just as much as non-developers are now building software applications.
  • PlatoIsADisease 8mo ago
    Can't wait to see how much money they lose. I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.
    • cubano 8mo ago
      > I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year. Sure..put it in Kalshi while your at it and we can all bet on it. I'm pretty sure he could grow one plant with someone in the know prompting him.
  • NewJazz 8mo ago
    Anyone can be a farmer. I've got veggies in my garden. Making a profit year after year is much much harder.
• embedding-shape 8mo ago
  These experiments always seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top, seemingly breaking down the idea behind the experiment in the first place. Seems better to spend the time and energy on finding better ways for AI to work hand-in-hand with the user, empowering them, rather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible. That whole part feels like a race to the bottom, instead of making it easier for the ones involved to do what they do.
  • LoganDark 8mo ago
    Using the example from the article, I guess restaurant managers need handholding by the chefs and servers, seemingly breaking down the idea behind restaurants, yet restaurants still exist. The point, I think, is that even if LLMs can't directly perform physical operations, they can still make decisions about what operations are to be performed, and through that achieve a result. And I also don't think it's fair to say there's no point just because there's a person prompting and interpreting the LLM. That happens all the time with real people, too.
    • embedding-shape 8mo ago
      > And I also don't think it's fair to say there's no point just because there's a person prompting and interpreting the LLM. That happens all the time with real people, too. Yes, what I'm trying to get at, it's much more vital we nail down the "person prompting and interpreting the LLM" part instead of focusing so much on the "autonomous robots doing everything".
      • LoganDark 8mo ago
        I feel you're still missing the point of the experiment... The entire thing was based on how Claude felt empowering -- "I felt like I could do anything with software from my terminal"... It's not at all about autonomous robots... It's about what someone can achieve with the assistance of LLMs, in this case Claude
• ge96 8mo ago
  Would be crazy it's looking through satellite imagery and is like "buy land in Africa" or whatever and gets a farm going there
• zeckalpha 8mo ago
  Another way to look at it is that Seth is a Tool that Claude can leverage.
  • LeifCarrotson 8mo ago
    On one end, a farmer or agronomist who just uses a pen, paper, and some education and experience can manage a farm without any computer tooling at all - or even just forecasts the weather and chooses planting times based on the aches in their bones and a finger in the dirt. One who uses a spreadsheet or dedicated farming ERP as a tool can be a little more effective. With a lot of automation, that software tooling can allow them to manage many acres of farms more easily and potentially more accurately. But if you keep going, on the other end, there's just a human who knows nothing about the technicalities but owns enough stock in the enterprise to sit on the board and read quarterly earnings reports. They can do little more than say "Yes, let us keep going in this direction" or "I want to vote in someone else to be on the executive team". Right now, all such corporations have those operational decisions being made by humans, or at least outsourced to humans, but it looks increasingly like an LLM agent could do much of that. It might hallucinate something totally nonsensical and the owner would be left with a pile of debt, but it's hard to say that Seth as just a stockholder is, in any real sense, a farmer, even if his AI-based enterprise grows a lot of corn. I think it would be unlikely but interesting if the AI decided that in furtherance of whatever its prompt and developing goals are to grow corn, it would branch out into something like real estate or manufacturing of agricultural equipment. Perhaps it would buy a business to manufacture high-tensile wire fence, with a side business of heavy-duty paperclips... and we all know where that would lead! We don't yet have the legal frameworks to build an AI that owns itself (see also "the tree that owns itself" [1]), so for now there will be a human in the loop. Perhaps that human is intimately involved and micromanaging, merely a hands-off supervisor, or relegated to an ownership position with no real capacity to direct any actions. But I don't think that you can say that an owner who has not directed any actions beyond the initial prompt is really "doing the work". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
    • DaiPlusPlus 8mo ago
• lukev 8mo ago
  Right. This whole process still appears to have a human as the ultimate outer loop. Still an interesting experiment to see how much of the tasks involved can be handled by an agent. But unless they've made a commitment not to prompt the agent again until the corn is grown, it's really a human doing it with agentic help, not Claude working autonomously.
  • marcd35 8mo ago
    Why wouldn't they be able to eventually set it up to work autonomously? A simple github action could run a check every $t hour to check on the status, and an orchestrator is only really needed once initially to set up the if>then decision tree.
    • patmcc 8mo ago
      That still doesn't seem autonomous in any real way though. There are people that I could hire in the real world, give $10k (I dunno if that's enough, but you understand what I mean) and say "Do everything necessary to grow 500 bushels of corn by October", and I would have corn in October. There are no AI agents where that's even close to true. When will that be possible?
      • autoexec 8mo ago
        Given enough time and money the chatbots we call "AI" today could contact and pay enough people that corn would happen. At some point it'll eventually have spammed and paid the right person who would manage everything necessary themselves after the initial ask and payment. Most people would probably just pocket the cash and never respond though.
        • greedo 8mo ago
          So an "AI chatbot" is going to disintermediate this process without adding any fundamental value. Sounds like a perfect SV play.... /s
        • lazide 8mo ago
• riazrizvi 8mo ago
  Yes. In other words, this is a nice exemplification of the issue that AI lacks world models. A case study to work through.
• Oras 8mo ago
  I think that’s the point though. If they succeeded in the experiment, they wouldn’t need to do the same instructions again, AI will handle everything based on what happened and probably learn from mistakes for the next round(s). Then what you asked “do everything to grow …” would be a matter of “when?”, not “can?”
• cyanydeez 8mo ago
  Isnt this boiled down to a cpmination of Xenos paradox and the halting problem. Every step seems to halve the problem state but each new state requires a question: should I halt? (Is the problem solved). Id say the only acceptable proof is one prompt context. But thats godels numbering Xenos paradox of a halting problem. Do people think prompting is not adding insignificant intelligencw.
• tw04 8mo ago
  >I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you. They could also just burn their cash. Because they aren’t making any money paying someone to grow corn for them unless they own the land and have some private buyers lined up.
  • aqme28 8mo ago
    Sure but that’s a different goalpost. Just growing food from an AI prompt is already impressive
  • PetriCasserole 8mo ago
    But that's how it goes. As late as 2005, the real estate agents I worked with finally began to trust email over fax machines. It cracked an egg wide open for them. Now relying on email, they were able to do 10x the work (I have no real data BUT I do know their incomes went from low six figures to multiple six figures). Prior to their adoption, they just thought email was a novelty and legally couldn't be relied upon.
• progval 8mo ago
  Anthropic tried that with a vending machine. The Claude instance managing it ended up ordering tungsten cubes and selling them at a loss. https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1 https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
  • 9dev 8mo ago
    > the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy. A plot line in Ray Naylers great book The Mountain in the Sea that plays in a plausible, strange, not-too-distant future, is that giant fish trawler fleet are run by AI connected to the global markets, fully autonomously. They relentlessly rip every last fish from the ocean, driven entirely by the goal of maximising profits at any cost. The world is coming along just nicely.
    • topaz0 8mo ago
      They also enslave human workers to do all the manual labor.
      • 9dev 8mo ago
        I didn't want to spoiler too much, but yes. They do.
        • trollbridge 8mo ago
          I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
          • sethammons 8mo ago
            It's an older code, but it checks out
  • bethekidyouwant 8mo ago
    People convinced the vending machine to stock tungsten cubes because it’s funny. Also tungsten cubes are cool.
• bodge5000 8mo ago
  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.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• amelius 8mo ago
  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).
  • crdrost 8mo ago
    Why. Why would you want this. The only framework we have figured out in which LLMs can build anything of use, requires LLMs to build a robot and then we expose the robot to the real world and the real world smacks it down and then we tell the LLMs about the wreckage. And we have to keep the feedback loops small and even then we have to make sure that the LLMs don't cheat. But you're not going to give it the opportunity to decrease the wealth tax or increase the income tax so it will never get the feedback it needs. You can try to train a neural network with backpropagation to simulate the actual economy, but I think you don't have enough data to really train the network. You can try to have it build a play economy where a bunch of agents have different needs and different skills and have to provide what they can when they can, but the "agent personalities" that you pick embed some sort of microeconomic outlook about what sort of rational purchasing agent exists -- and a lot of what markets do is just kind of random fad-chasing, not rationally modelable. I just don't see why you'd use that square peg to fill this round hole. Just ask economics professors, they're happy to make those predictions.
    • deleted 8mo ago
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    • amelius 8mo ago
      Maybe you are right, but I'd like to see a competition where a computer (running AI agents) and an economics professor make predictions.
  • the_af 8mo ago
    > 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). Please tell me you've watched the Mitchell & Webb skit. If not , google "Mitchell Webb kill all the poor" and thank me later. Edit: also please tell me you know (if not played) of the text adventure "A Mind Forever Voyaging"... without spoiling anything, it's mainly about this topic. Everything old is new again :)
• bogtog 8mo ago
  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
• varispeed 8mo ago
  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"
• jmspring 8mo ago
  I think with the work John Deere is doing to keep closed systems, I could see a proprietary sdk and equipment guidance component.
• fuzzer371 8mo ago
  It's because "AI" is the new "Crypto". Useless for everything, but everyone wants to jam it into everything.
• lighthouse1212 8mo ago
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• deleted 8mo ago
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