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Posted by rocauc 1/23/2026

Proof of Corn(proofofcorn.com)
476 points | 307 commentspage 4
starkparker 1/23/2026|
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.

socalgal2 1/23/2026||
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)
snackbroken 1/23/2026|
The diagram looks correct for me when I disable CSS on the page or edit it's font-family to be "monospace". Seems like Geist Mono might just be borked.
tiffanyh 1/24/2026||
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

recursive 1/23/2026||
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.
stephantul 1/24/2026||
The header line of the website (“this is our response”) makes it appear as if the experiment was already successful.
jovial_cavalier 1/23/2026||
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.

FuturisticLover 1/23/2026||
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.

jdwg 1/23/2026||
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!

bradgranath 1/23/2026|
This is the literal definition of a Reverse Centaur.

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

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