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/