Some of what you read on this site was written with help from AI. We want to tell you how that works, and the longer story behind it, because if you are going to trust what we publish, you should know how it gets made.
The work came first.
OpenAgTechnology grew out of years of real work by the people in this collective. The collaboration goes back to 2013 and a project called HAPI, the Hydroponic Automation Platform Initiative. It grew in 2016 and has continued since. Between us we bring decades of combined experience to the same set of questions: how plants actually respond to their environment, how growers make decisions, and how data and control fit into a real growing operation instead of a brochure. Those years were notebooks and spreadsheets, software that worked and software that didn't, research we collected, and long hours spent growing things and watching what happened. The work is older than the name. We are only now formalizing the collective.
None of that came from a machine. It came from doing the work, and often from getting it wrong first.
Then AI arrived, and earned a place.
By the time AI models were good enough to be useful, we had years of scattered material between us: design documents, half-built platforms, old code, research, and ideas none of us had managed to write down clearly. The first thing AI did was help us organize it. It read through work we had not opened in years and found the through-line across documents we had written far apart, for different reasons. It helped us take a pile of real, hard-won experience and turn it into something another person could actually read and use.
For the past year we have worked with AI nearly every day to sharpen the concepts on this site and to write much of its content.
How we use it, and where the line is.
We treat AI as three tools, and nothing more than that.
As a thinking partner, we argue ideas with it. We ask it to find the weak points in our reasoning and to tell us when we are wrong. The judgment stays ours.
As a researcher, it helps us find sources, summarize what the literature says, and check claims against what is known. Anything that matters, we verify ourselves. Where this site makes an agronomic claim, the intent is that you can trace it to a real source, and we cite them.
As a writing tool, it helps us get ideas out of our heads and onto the page in plain language. We bring the substance and the experience. It helps with the words. Then we read every line, because the writing has to be true and it has to be ours.
What AI does not do is decide what is true, what we believe, or what belongs on this site. That was true before AI, and it stays true now. People are behind every page.
Why we tell you this.
This whole project rests on one idea: use the right tool for the job, whether that tool is a twenty-dollar sensor or a language model. AI is a tool like any other. Used with care, it took years of hard work and helped make it useful to other people. Used carelessly, it produces confident, polished nonsense, and there is plenty of that going around. We would rather tell you plainly than pretend no machine had a hand in it.
So if you find something here that is wrong, tell us. We will fix it, and we will own it. The help we had writing it does not change who is responsible for it.