Yes.. And to boot, a language survival estimate should maybe be more than half as long as its predecessor about half the time. Someone writing infra go code may throw out everything but the go within any 10 year period.

It seems very wasteful to me to have a lot of small devices sitting out in the elements, how resilient are they going to be?

Wouldn't a device that travels like a snail along a cable or something, while less glamorous than a self propelled (and navigating) device, deliver a reading for a whole line of plants every day without all of the eroding parts per plant?

It’s pretty normal to have devices out in the elements now, it’s just a matter of how many. Yes having a device on literally every plant will probably always be overkill, unless they are so cheap and easy to replace that it doesn’t matter when one gets damaged. More likely it’d be optimal to have a device every x-number of plants - which is what’s done now but the number of devices per number of plants needs to be higher than is currently conventional to increase precision.

Having machines moving around taking readings “each day” is insufficient, as during hot conditions the soil/plant moisture changes too rapidly. You need to take readings at least once every hour or even every 30 or 15 minutes in order to be able to start irrigating immediately when the moisture level starts dropping rapidly.

For farming on a forest floor, I would expect overly complex variance.. For farming in a field, why isn't the deviance you calculate between the needs of plant location 1 & 2 on a frequent basis not a reasonable estimate to update the predicted needs of one plant every time you pass over the other?

I can imagine that a lot of small devices becomes economically viable.. I find that unfortunate since I think it will be a lot of permanent ewaste lost in fields relative to very temporary water optimization benefits.