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".

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)

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/Prog...

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?

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.

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

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 )

> Coordinates human operators

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

> 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.

"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.

- 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.

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?

I don't know anything about farming, but the budget seems extremely dubious. 1370 on the lease, 350 on "IoT sensors" and "soil testing" (why?), but only 800 on "Custom Operator", which I'm assuming is supposed to be the labor, for seven months (apr-oct). So that's an average budget of 114 dollars on labor per month. For minimum wage that buys you 15 hours of work. Is this all a big trolling attempt aimed at HN users?

Several things about LLMs make this a hard or complex experiment and maybe too much for the current tech.

1) context: lack of sensors and sensor processing, maybe solvable with web cams in the field but manual labor required for soil testing etc

2)Time bias: orchestration still has a massive recency bias in LLMs and a huge underweighting of established ground truth. Causing it to weave and pivot on recent actions in a wobbly overcorrecting style.

3) vagueness: by and large most models still rely on non committal vagueness to hide a lack of detailed or granular expertise. This granular expertise tends to hallucinate more or just miss context more and get it wrong.

I’m curious how they plan to overcome this. It’s the right type of experiment, but I think too ambitious of a scale.

This is lopsided. Technology promised to remove drudgery from our lives, and now we're seeing experiments that automate all the easy, air-conditioned decision making while still delegating the toil to humans

Unequivocally awful

> 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

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!"

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

Pure dystopia.

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.

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

It's an interesting concept, but I'm skeptical about how feasible this is. How much design/legwork/intervention will Seth actually contribute during the entire process? I'm thinking "growing corn" might be a little hard for a proof of concept, specifically because the time horizon is quite long. Something a little more short term like: contracting a landscaping job. The model comes up with design ideas, contacts landscapers, gets bids, accepts a bid. Seth could tell the model that he's it's agent, available to sign for things, walk people through the property, etc, but will make no decisions, and is only reachable by email or text.

I'm waiting for the "Can it do Management?" experiment.

I do not have a positive impression/experience of most middle/low level management in corporate world. Over 30 years in the workforce, I've watched it evolve to a "secretary/clerk, usually male, who agrees to be responsible for something they know little about or not very good at doing, pretend at orchestrating".

Like growing corn, lots of literature has been written about it. So models have lots to work with and synthesize. Why not automate the meetings and metric gatherings and mindless hallucinations and short sighted decisions that drone-ish be-like-the-other-manager people do?

As a full-on farmer, the idea of Claude making the decisions on our farm of several thousand acres gives me the willies. I program with Claude and I don't trust it to write a test script without vetting it thoroughly and fixing a couple things before running it.

Betting millions of dollars in capital on it's decision making process for something it wasn't even designed for and is way more complicated than even I believed coming from a software background into farming is patently ludicrous.

And 5 acres is a garden. I doubt he'll even find a plot to rent at that size, especially this close to seeding in that area.

"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.

I have believed for a couple of years that AI could do a better job of managing farm crop marketing than the average farmer. It would remove the emotion involved in selling the crop.

Managing all the decisions in growing a crop is too far a reach. Maybe someday, not today. Way too many variables and unexpected issues. I'm a former fertilizer company agronomist and the problem is far harder than say self driving cars.

This actually is a good summary of my theory of AI. The best use case for AI is replacing management. Thats the real reason AI is floundering right now with making money. The people in charge would literally need to admit that they are basically no longer needed and act accordingly.

This of course will never happens so instead those in power will continue to try to shoehorn AI into making slaves which is what they want, but not the ideal usage for AI.

I don’t see how this ever gets past the land phase. How does the AI know if the proposed land rental is fertile, farmable, accessible to vehicles, accessible to specific machinery, etc? Assuming a human intervenes here, I don’t see how you find an operator to get up to run a combine on 5 acres for the harvest. I’d have as much luck finding someone to do it on my backyard garden.

Given that this is an experiment and the website says they want to treat Claude as a “true collaborator”, they should follow the AI’s directions EXACTLY. Claude alone should make decisions and no human should be allowed to deviate from its instructions, even if they know better. That’s what would make this a valuable experiment, otherwise if there’s a human moderating Claude then it’s no better than Googling.

The discussion is actually more funny than it would seem. Corn existed long before humans. We aren't required for growing corn, the corn grows all by it self. It's like saying I grow your hair after serving you a cup of your favorite tea. We do know what people refer to when they say they are growing corn. When AI grows the corn we also know what is referred to.

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

If this is a joke, it's a bad one. If it's not, it's even dumber.

The point could be made by having it design and print implements for an indoor container grow and then run lights and water over a microcontroller. Like Anthropic's vending machine this would also be an already addressed, if not solved, space for both home manufacturing and ag/garden automation.

It'd still be novel to see an LLM figure it out from scratch step by step, and a hell of a lot more interesting than whatever the fuck this is. Googling farmland in Iowa or Texas and then writing instructions for people to do the actual work isn't novel or interesting; of course an LLM can write and fill out forms. But the end result still primarily relies on people to execute those forms and affect the world, invalidating the point. Growing corn would be interesting, project managing corn isn't.

HN type "about the website itself, not it's content" comment but ... it would be great if we could somehow get the major browser vendors to agree on some monospaced fonts. I'm on M1 Mac and the small ASCII diagram, nothing lines up (Safari/Firefox/Chrome). I see this on many ASCII diagrams. Maybe that's the site's fault. Not sure)

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://proofofcorn.com/story

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

This is the literal definition of a Reverse Centaur.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

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.

But "AI" already does drive the tractor/combine/sprayer etc.

Look up precision ag.

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/

Commanding a bunch of twitch streamers, seem a lower entry cost for this test

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IflNUap2HME

   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

Really cool - even cooler if some farming related hardware on a designated plot of land can be setup so it's more than an ai agent finding someone to hire via apis.

Given how the front page's ASCII diagram is misaligned on my browser, I think I have a few concerns about factors that might lead to, well, oversights...

Reminds me of this project from friends of mine:

https://autonomousforest.org/map

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

> When we harvest corn in October...

We, as in humans?

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

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

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

The Corn Demon is alive and well in 2026.

Proof of Corn.

Such a nice term to use as an AI-related alternative to "jump the shark".

I'll definitely be using.

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

“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.

Proof of corncept was right there!

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

Man Buys Domain and Posts Plan to Talk to the Computer

581 points 342 comments

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

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/

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

This is the kind of cool stuff i come here for

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.

Can they change the name to Proof Of Corncept?

Nice proof of corncept for a New Economy.

https://farm.bot/ exists.

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.

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

AI CEOs are coming.

> 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.

Yeah this rules

Eventually robots will do this but as long as humans do the actual irl actions it makes me think of a dystopian future where all leadership decision are made by harsh micromanaging AI bosses and low paying physical labor is the only job around for humans.

I reckon producing corn in the Midwest would be the most researched and documented crop and location ever in history. So baked into an LLM should be some very good knowledge and assumptions. Growing a different crop elsewhere may be more challenging.

so cringe

I hate this timeline

This is so fucking stupid

Your job is to grow corn.

Claude: Oh. My. God.

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

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

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.