[lukev]

Right. This whole process still appears to have a human as the ultimate outer loop.

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.

[marcd35]

Why wouldn't they be able to eventually set it up to work autonomously? A simple github action could run a check every $t hour to check on the status, and an orchestrator is only really needed once initially to set up the if>then decision tree.

[sdwr]

The question is whether the system can be responsible for the process. Big picture, AI doing 90% of the task isn't much better than it doing 50%, because a person still needs to take responsibility for it actually getting done.

If Claude only works when the task is perfectly planned and there are no exceptions, that's still operating at the "junior" level, where it's not reliable or composable.

[patmcc]

That still doesn't seem autonomous in any real way though.

There are people that I could hire in the real world, give $10k (I dunno if that's enough, but you understand what I mean) and say "Do everything necessary to grow 500 bushels of corn by October", and I would have corn in October. There are no AI agents where that's even close to true. When will that be possible?

[autoexec]

Given enough time and money the chatbots we call "AI" today could contact and pay enough people that corn would happen. At some point it'll eventually have spammed and paid the right person who would manage everything necessary themselves after the initial ask and payment. Most people would probably just pocket the cash and never respond though.

[lazide]

You can already do this by…. Buying corn. At the store. Or worst case at a distributor.

It’s pretty cheap too.

It’s not like these are novel situations where ‘omg AI’ unlocks some new functionality. It’s literally competing against an existing, working, economic system.

[greedo]

So an "AI chatbot" is going to disintermediate this process without adding any fundamental value. Sounds like a perfect SV play....

/s

[bluGill]

You only want to apply expensive fungicide when there is a fungus problem. That means someone needs to go out to the field and check - at least today. You don't want to harvest until the corn is dry, someone needs to check the progress of drying before - today the farmer hand harvest a few cobs of corn from various parts of the field to check. There are lots of other things the farmer is checking that we don't have sensors for - we could but they would be too expensive.

[9rx]

> You only want to apply expensive fungicide when there is a fungus problem. That means someone needs to go out to the field and check

Nah. If you can see that you have tar spot, you are already too late. To be able to selectively apply fungicide, someone needs to model the world around them to determine the probability of an oncoming problem. That is something that these computer models are theoretically quite well suited for. Although common wisdom says that fungicide applications on corn will always, at very least, return the cost of it, so you will likely just apply it anyway.

[aqme28]

There’s no reason an AI couldn’t anticipate these things and hire people to do those checks and act on their reports as though it were a human farmer. Thats different than an AI researcher telling Claude which step is next.

[greedo]

"hire people to do those..."

We already have those people, they're called farmers. And they are already very used to working with high technology. The idea of farmers being a bunch of hicks is really pretty stupid. For example, farmers use drones for spraying pesticides, fungicides, and inputs like fertilizer. They use drones to detect rocks in fields that then generate maps for a small skid steer to optimally remove the rocks.

They use GPS enabled tractors and combines that can tell how deep a seed is planted, what the yield is on a specific field (to compare seed hybrids), what the moisture content of the crop is. They need to be able to respond to weather quickly so that crops get harvested at the optimal times.

Farmers also have to become experts in crop futures, crop insurance, irrigation and tillage best practices; small equipment repair, on and on and on.

[andoando]

Presumably because operating a farm isnt a perfectly repeatable process and you need to constantly manage different issues that come up

[pests]

> But unless they've made a commitment not to prompt the agent again

Model UI's like Gemini have "scheduled actions" so in the initial prompt you could have it do things daily and send updates or reports, etc, and it will start the conversation with you. I don't think its powerful enough to say spawn sub agents but there is some ability for them to "start chats".