I had dinner on Wednesday night with my friend Seth, who has been building products and companies since I met him over thirty years ago. He was expounding on his newfound ability to build products and companies all by himself with AI coding tools. His enthusiasm was off the charts, and I decided to pour some cold water on it and said, "yeah but it can't do stuff in the real world yet." And he said, "Like what?" And I said, "Like grow corn."

The next morning this landed in my text messages.

As Seth writes in the story tab of that website:

SETH: “I can do anything I want with software from my terminal.”

FRED: “That's not fire. You can't like grow corn.”

SETH: “I bet you I could. You know what I mean? I'm going to grow corn for you.”

FRED: “That'd be great. Thank you.”

SETH: “I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to show you. And that'll be our first vibe coding project together.”

FRED: “It's a physical thing.”

SETH: “I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal and I will hire some service to plant corn.”

FRED: “Okay, well that's a little different... you're going to get somebody to grow corn for you. But that's not exactly what I'm talking about. Like, you can hire Jeff to come and make dinner for you, but like you can't make dinner.”

SETH: “No, but anything that could be done with technology, I can do now. Anything, which is insane.”

So now, Seth has roped me into his project that he calls Proof of Corn, and we are collaborating in a shared GitHub repo with a goal of growing corn.

He made his point and it landed with me:

This project isn't just about growing corn. It's about documenting what happens when you take AI seriously as a collaborator rather than a tool.

Every decision will be logged. Every API call documented. Every dollar tracked. When we harvest corn in October, we'll have a complete record of how an idea became a reality—with AI as the orchestration layer.