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?
To make this a full AI experiment, emails to this inbox should be fielded by Claude as well.
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.
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 :)
1. Do some research (as it's already done)
2. Rent the land and hire someone to grow the corn
3. Hire someone to harvest it, transport it, and store it
4. Manage to sell it
Doing #1 isn't terribly exciting - it's well established that AIs are pretty good at replacing an hour of googling - but if it could run a whole business process like this, that'd be neat.
But,
"I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal"
Who has multiple millions of dollars to drop on an experiment like that?
Ok then Seth is missing the point of the challenge: Take over the role of the farmhand.
> Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.
Everyone knows this. There is nothing novel here. Desk jockeys who just drive computers all day (the Farmer in this example) are _far_ easier to automate away than the hands-on workers (the farmhand). That’s why it would be truly revolutionary to replace the farmhand.
Or, said another way: Anything about growing corn that is “hands on” is hard to automate, all the easy to automate stuff has already been done. And no, driving a mouse or a web browser doesn’t count as “hands on”.
To be fair, all the stuff that hasn't been automated away is the same in all cases, farmer and farmhand alike: Monitoring to make sure the computer systems don't screw up.
The bet here is that LLMs are past the "needs monitoring" stage and can buy a multi-million dollar farm, along with everything else, without oversight and Seth won't be upset about its choices in the end. Which, in fairness, is a more practical (at least less risky form a liability point of view) bet than betting that a multi-million dollar X9 without an operator won't end up running over a person and later upside-down in the ditch.
He may have many millions to spend on an experiment, but to truly put things to the test would require way more than that. Everyone has a limit. An MVP is a reasonable start. v2 can try to take the concept further.
Claude: Go to the owner of the building and say "if you tell me the height of your building I will give you this fine barometer."
I mean, more or less, but you see what I'm getting at.
Most food is picked by migrant laborers, not machines.
(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 )
Aren't these companies in the business of leasing land? I dont see how contacting them about leasing land would be spam or bothering them. And I dont really know what you mean by "with no legal authority to actually follow up with what is requested."
Claude: Oh. My. God.
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
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".
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.
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".
I think this is the new turing test. Once it's been passed we will have AGI and all the Sam Altmans of the world will be proven correct. (This isn't a perfect test obviously, but neither was the turing test)
If it fails to pass we will still have what jdthedisciple pointed out
> a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience
I am actually curious how many people really believe AGI will happen. Theres alot of talk about it, but when can I ask claude code to build me a browser from scratch and I get a browser from scratch. Or when can I ask claude code to grow corn and claude code grows corn. Never? In 2027? In 2035? In the year 3000?
HN seems rife with strong opinions on this, but does anybody really know?
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
"Thinking quickly, Dave constructs a homemade megaphone, using only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone."
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.
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.
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?
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_moneyI'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).
Look up precision ag.
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.
Anyway, turned it off; sure enough, misaligned.
I’m guessing this will screw up in assuming infinite labor & equipment liqudity.
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
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.
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.
Pure dystopia.
The endless complaining and goalposting shifting is exhausting
Unequivocally awful
"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
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.
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.
bstsb•1h ago