alt Hacker NewsProof of Corn
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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?
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)
Similar to the growing tomato stuff with claude https://x.com/d33v33d0/status/2006221407340867881 Your project seems more achieved !
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.
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 )
> 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.
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?
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...
> 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).
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.
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/
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?
> Coordinates human operators
"Thinking quickly, Dave constructs a homemade megaphone, using only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone."
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_moneyBut "AI" already does drive the tractor/combine/sprayer etc.
Look up precision ag.
Reminds me of this project from friends of mine:
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
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.
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.
somewhat related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311144
https://farm.bot/ exists.
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.
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.
> 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.
Your job is to grow corn.
Claude: Oh. My. God.
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.
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".