I'm being sincere when I say (as I've said on two threads here) that this genre of posts --- "I'm leaving this company I've been very publicly associated with, and here's the new thing I'm doing" --- is deeply cursed. There's no way to say anything interesting without it just stinking like an ad for the new thing.
Obviously, anything at all you say about a commercial project you're working on is easily read as promotional. And you're right, this kind of writing almost always is promotional. But there's a way to do it where at least you're trying to be in conversation with your peers, rather than hitting people over the head with how awesome you think the project is.
But I don't know how to do that in a post like this. I think the only way to read it is as, like, an investor memo. Not my goal, but I don't make the rules.
So my strategy here is just to stay kind of vague, and talk about where I think the world is going, rather than the specific thing we're doing. I can talk your ears off about capability systems, datalog, models driving hardware, virtualization, whatever. Those are fun conversations and I'm very psyched to have them; it's what lights me up about the work we're doing now.
But I don't think it can work here. I didn't submit this post and I didn't upvote it. I wrote it because I didn't want the whole thing I'm leaving Fly.io for to be wrapped up in some dumb Twitter thread.
If you're unsatisfied with the post, I don't blame you, but it's less a bid for the front page of HN than it is an update to my "about me" page. I'd literally rather talk about HN meta, and how to write for HN, than I would about operating systems at this moment. I truly appreciate the interest though.
You were the exception. Most kids felt awe. We started learning BASIC and creating "dumb games". That's the origin story of most people my age who ended up in this doomed industry.
Nothing about this is groundbreaking and could have been written in BASIC.
I grew up on BASIC using a BBC Micro in the 80s, using a QWERTY keyboard and a screen. Some decades later I'm using a QWERTY keyboard and a screen with a few more pixels. I'm betting nothing will change much. An OS will do OS things, just a lot faster and more securely.
Spreadsheets will still be useful for making deterministic calculations about finances. It will just no longer take 100 engineers to build one.
GIS software will continue to use deterministic algorithms for calculating areas because it's a useful function but, hopefully it will get more user friendly.
I am at a job where I am paid well to build software to do things in a distributed system that processes information across various external systems (some with physical world impacts). The outcome of that computing is revenue for the company. Using agent-wrapped LLMs makes the software authorship component of the job really fast. The rest is virtually the same speed.
For Thomas's mobile computing examples, these are done really well by my phone's operating system's built-in voice command system, mature for a decade by now.
At home, I use software that is well-crafted to do some thing. Or I write a series of scripts to do narrow things that for some reason aren't in Aptitude or Snap, for example "copy all the photos off my iPhone and rename them and sort them by date in my filesystem".
Perhaps I have no imagination, but I don't feel like having an LLM make applications on my phone. I want good software that someone that I trust wrote.
Thomas has been a successful cryptographer, vulnerability analyst, and entrepreneur, so he probably knows what he's doing. I just don't get it.
"Write an app to provide psychological advice to people with mild anxiety, then market it and sell it to people with mild anxiety."
If an entrepreneur did that with no domain expertise, imagine the potential liability.
How do you know the output is correct for anything that matters more than completing simple and repetitive tasks? You still have to know an expert in a domain has vetted the software. The result of applying AI to OS development is making itself fairly clear with MS I believe.
Looking towards macOS and iOS for example, an underrated feature for the “it just runs your web browser” crowd is all of the system-provided databases. These turn rather specialized systems - photo libraries, music streaming, calendaring, contacts management, and mail into shared databases that link applications together.
On iOS it goes much further - because of HealthKit, my Withings scale, my Garmin (when I had one), my MyNetDiary nutrition tracker, my continuous Glucose Monitor, and my third-party analytics apps share the same access to my data. And it is done securely - I can choose exactly which part each sees. This is a tremendous resource for both developers and LLMs.
My calendar, hosted on a personal server but available through Calendar, is transparently available to my to-do list app - so I can see my appointments, my tasks, and even my workouts (thanks to health kit) in one view.
Weather is a system service on iOS. Calendar is a system service. Contacts is a system service. Health data is a system service. Even music - third-party apps can control and consume your music library on iOS - is a system service (if you use it).
My Mac knows how to develop RAW files out of the box, and it can connect with integrations to get them printed, and use my library metadata to sync my favorites to my phone. I have a third party app that syncs my Apple photos library to my NAS.
A good OS, like iOS or macOS, could be the fabric that holds all your vibe-coded and ephemeral LLM apps together. I see it making a whole new category of things possible.
> Is there a meeting happening anywhere right this minute that I’m supposed to be in?
> You can go on and on like this. These all sound trivial. That’s the point. They’re normal-life problems nobody would have built serious programs around, because the audience sounds too small.
Waze and Calendars. Both have huge audiences.
If I'm running software written by an LLM, even if I was the one who prompted the LLM, I would still want my OS to treat it as if written by a stranger.
I know he's not necessarily talking about relaxing security models here, but he's not being very specific about his vision otherwise.
Most people, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was 90%, who've had any interaction with AI are still stuck on chatting with a chatbot. They've got no clue how far you can now go with a few well written markdown files and/or prompts, all in natural language!
So while I mostly agree on your outlook, and think it's super exciting, I've also felt firsthand that building with AI hasn't yet diffused as much I'd hoped it would. It's still concentrated in the hands of people who have an aptitude for building in some way, shape or form.
The question is: How do you get more people, who aren't power users or builders, to start building with AI? Maybe it starts with getting them to see that building to solve their own life's problems makes life more interesting?
All you need to do is look at history to realise that. We had things like BASIC, HyperCard, and the early web that attracted droves of people who were excited by the opportunities. While a lot of those people went into industry to write software for other people, a lot did not. Most people, I suspect, didn't even explore the potential because they simply don't think of computers as programmable machines -- even if they were aware that there are people who program computers for a living.
And to them software is generally a not much more than a home-screen bookmark to some client that could be a website.
The hand-held computer tells them what they're permitted to do, and they conform.
Sometimes, one of the users has a non-conforming idea and says "I'd like to be a superuser on my computer" and they're shouted down with a chorus of "you'll be hacked" and "nobody will be able to trust your computer and you'll be excluded from online services". Sometimes the organisations saying this even use the excuse that "restricting the user is essential to maintaining the user's privacy".
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Then the AI will just create the image that resembles a spreadsheet or whatever on the fly and write straight to the framebuffer.
All other tasks that go with the spreadsheet will also be done on the fly.
But I could imagine our language will change and certain words will basically act like macros and create a set of assumptions and specifications for the prompt that you're using.
Uncharitably... because eventually they hope to produce a phone that isn't running iOS or Android?
More charitably because the title is actually an important question right now in the abstract for almost everything, not just operating systems.
But the forces that shape the question are so large and hard to get a handle on when we are living through the moment that you have to start thinking about it somewhere, why not OSes?
Most of these problems the slop apps can solve are dependent on gathering information to answer questions. If no one ever visits weather.com to get weather information, ad revenue will completely dry up and the site will go under. Then the slop stops slopping and I can’t get my hyper local weather app to work.
I’m not going to go as far as to say this article is wrong, in fact in this cursed timeline it’s probably right. I just don’t see how it’s good.
Software in the future will have to be building blocks for agents to extend. For my projects I decided to generate LLM targeted guides in the docs/ folder, to teach agents quickly "how to" use the project as a framework.
How to implement an MVC view, where to place the files, a guide how to write a good backend route, how to extend the schemas, and other articles like that.
In my opinion we've already reached "Star Trek like computers". Our OS will have to accommodate for better sandboxing and better permission management and better role separation policies, because currently that whole security sector assumes that programs will be static and won't change before/after an approval.
We need to figure out how to better sandbox programs in terms of not only control flow, but also in terms of access to _data_ on a user's behalf.
(The irony is that all the reading that's gone into our design is like, old CSAIL papers. Maybe it's true! Maybe everything we're doing is just crate-digging through old settled computer science. That would be on brand. I should find a way to work Athena into it. Maybe we'll use Zephyr for messaging.)
Back when Google was the newest thing, I would Google all the obscure things that I could think of, trying to fill in gaps in my knowledge. Trying to verify urban myths but usually debunking them, etc.
Any power user or even any user, could have done that. But most people who considered themselves critically thinkers actually did the opposite, digging deeper into all the harmful rabbit holes we see today.
A lot of things can done "with just a few steps" with AI but I think it's underestimated how hard it is to come up with those steps.
Not that the article isn't interesting otherwise.
It's the thing that runs your AI agent, that runs your AI pocket bot (AIBI looks cute btw), that runs the software doing the training of AI models, that runs the datacenters doing the inference, etc.
There's still data. There are still bits moving. Filesystems and networking aren't going anywhere.
In a charitable reading the title is something like "what is even a desktop OS now?" or "what is even a consumer OS now?".
As for the new project, I've got one bet: there's Linux involved to host it.
Linux is an OS.
P.S: as a sidenote the entire "users don't install apps anymore" was already true to some extent. A shitload of users are totally fine with an OS that runs a browser and that's it. And they're fully operational. And we still all know what an OS is, even for, say, a Chromebook. Heck, I'm not even sure "installing apps" as ever been, except during the first install of the OS, what an OS was ever about.
This seems to be only thought out after a day of vibe coding apps that no-one uses.
Unclear what will be left next to it. It will just live on your phone and take care of everything. The apps will be markdown files describing what they do, probably compiled ahead of time for latency.
But the model will be in control, so what else is left to implement besides giving it bash, a compiler and a display?
I guess there is value in the year before that happens.
IMO even this AI phone is doomed in the slightly longer run.
One more step into the weirdness and people will just be working with AI to build their own bespoke phone with the specs sent over to a manufacturer that is "like PCBWay, but spits out whole devices".
I have no idea what this does to society, the economy, etc when we reach a point where nobody really "needs" any kind of middleman for almost anything (well, except for things they actually really need, like food and shelter), but it looks like I'll see it happen for a bit before I die.
The same. The slop apps remain just that. They may do something useful for you, but that's it. A bit like a branch in a repository.
not just startup nerd, he also make gas town and drunken rant
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I'm pretty AI pilled, and I'm building a local-first personal software platform, but I dunno... I've been feeling like i need to cram the "AI spirit" into very specifically shaped boxes to actually build robust software tastefully at speed. Like software on the outside and AI on the inside instead of the other way around.
I do think the future of computing will definitely be more like the Linux diaspora than the apple ecosystem, but also.. it is easy to get "duped" by AI without actually shipping. I'm starting to want "KPIs" to help me measure if my time is actually well spent against the things i care about.
I guess I'm extrapolating from your post, but even if the programming language is English, we'll probably still want to spend a large amount of additional compute to produce "artifacts" that have things like performant code, security hardening, and certified taste.
I do think the future of computing will definitely be more like the Linux diaspora than the apple ecosystem, but also... when i first got into linux i spent way too long trying to get my desktop perfectly aesthetic because it was all suddenly malleable. Now i vibe more with Debian.
I wish you luck, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with! Fun times ahead for sure.
This is such incredible verbiage. Thank you for saying something so clearly that I've been saying myself in many other ways. I've been using terms such as "providing structure" and "applying constraints" and "reducing degrees of freedom".
I think very specifically the idea of "taste" is going to be extremely important in these AI-saturated days, and it's really where experienced humans will shine...at least for a while.
I completely agree that we haven’t even gotten past the first post yet in terms of the magnitude of change that is likely to occur. People fail to comprehend that we’re still assimilating the Internet as a means of communication. Cell phones. It will be decades before what we have today is fully utilized, let alone what is likely to be developed. Anyway, thanks for the article.
If you're looking for a UX idea, when the phone boots, it asks "What are the top 5 things you do?". And that's how the phone experience starts.
All the best. (Ignore the silly haters, they're lost in their AI pessimism to just look forward to a new intersting thing).
As someone who's building its news project on it, it's both reassuring, but also not since you're leaving..
These are bad-faith arguments toward "What about self modifying software".
Self modifying software has no grounds in reality or predictable behavior. It is an unreasonable expectation that software is magic. You would not fly on a self-modifying airplane. This is not a future i want to live in.
No; sorry, no.
But it seems that he is falling for the LLM hype the same way. We all have the kid version of ourselves hiding somewhere within our grown versions, it seems...
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Yet magazines and books commonly published program listings for games in BASIC which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.
Until like a year ago.
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BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough for a wide range of applications including numerical methods, simulations, data processing, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or an 8-bit microcomputer.
Even though the Mac was GUI-based, for a time it shipped with, and promoted, HyperCard, which led to a brief explosion of user-created programs developed as HyperCard stacks.
Yes, but now everyone and their mum has a personal computing device, and there's tutorials readily accessible, and five seconds of googling can bring you to an online programming environment.
As I mentioned, I think graphing calculators might be an exception.
I actually still don't know BASIC.
But I think we were the exception, even if we didn’t realise it at the time. In hindsight, my interest was most definitely not shared by my peers.
I hope this makes you feel better: all industries are doomed. But few rise and fall in one lifetime.
“Mom, I’m bored will you buy this a new computer game?” “Lol no! Go outside.” “Well crap. I guess I’ll have to write my own game.”
I guess that means you are still interested in pretty much everything
Adopters feel the future is brighter than ever.
Article author is excited. I am too.
I feel like the future is bright precisely because AI sucks so bad while also lowering the bar.
It made people not take software and software engineers for granted. Public perception of software has also finally matured. Boomers and tech CEOs fell into a tarpit that harshly exposes their stupidity while laypeople now feel like they can change the system.
This is all exciting in the best ways. My usage of AI at work and for personal projects goes as far as whatever the AI summary is on google. That's more than enough for me to get enough of a productivity boost on par with those who embarrassingly thrust themselves balls deep and refuse to pull out. Not everyone has to push the "I'm feeling lucky" button to get the same work done at the same pace.
Please.
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Unless you have a local model and the appropriate hardware for it, your agent is Somebody Else's Computer. Do you really want to send all your data and make your entire computing experience dependent on whatever OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever else is planning in this moment?
That's not even starting with inference time and token cost. Despite all the incredible advances in inference, it still takes more time than most non-AI computer functionality. Do you really want to wait a few minutes and pay money for something that you could also do with a few clicks fully locally on your PC?
But the most important thing: User interfaces. Right now, we're basically cramming everything you could possibly want to do at a computer into a chat interface. But there are lots of applications fir which specialized graphical interfaces are much more suitable. Why would you want to get rid of them?
Somewhat connected to that: Repetition. If you have to do the same task again every week or every day, it seems wasteful to ask the AI for it every time: Not just are you wasting a lot of time, energy and tokens, you're also at risk of getting inconsistent results, if the agent from today's session will interpret the requirements slightly differently than the agent from yesterday.
You can circumvent all those things by having the AI write you a custom app, but then using the app without AI to do the task.
I'm not a Treky but I think Star Trek has the right interface here. For basic operations you just use voice and tell it your intent or what you need to know "Computer, what's the fastest route for me to get home?". "Madison is fastest right now, it's 3 minutes faster than Lake, it traffic is building up".
This isn't just whatever Waze gives you, it knows about your constraints and preferences. So you need to program that somehow. Imagine taking it one step further "Computer, what's the fastest route to pickup my daughter and get home?" or even it just responding to the first prompt "Take Roosevelt, and today you need to pickup your daughter from volleyball".
In Star Trek they often do this when they create "simulations". They tell the computer constraints and then it refines it. No writing programs, but effectively that's what you are doing but with the natural language voice interface.
"Computer let's create a simulation to figure out the fastest way for me to get home. I want to take a route along the expressway and know whether to get off at Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake. I need to pickup my daughter when she has volleyball." You don't need to repeat the whole instruction each time, and behind the scenes it is probably turning it into some deterministic code, so next time you trigger that program it's not going to hallucinate some nonsense.
My point is that text-based interfaces - and voice is just a convenience around text - are not the best interfaces for a lot of tasks.
Fortunately our industry has been getting people used to these for years.
Current capabilities are not there. You need software engineers to keep it going. And even then as intoxicating as it might be to be able to bring to life all the side projects you often had no energy/skill to finish, today it is still may be cost / “cognitive load” -effective to buy off the shelf apps that somebody else has to maintain (even if they are not as personal / less customized for your use-case).
Applications are compressed bundles of some assumptions about how something should work and be interacted with. So you wouldn’t need VLC, it’s a shell around a foundational codec layer. Instagram is just a view over data in the Instagram social network, and you could customise it as you see fit. Transmit is a lovely application but you can delegate that to a fluid task layer that can do one-off tasks or make something you can re-use.
Everything in the fat ‘middle layer’ of software that is connecting a user to something foundational through interface assumptions might disappear, unless it’s more useful for it to exist as a permanent tool. Things that a lot of people share or that are more complex, Blender for example.
I also imagine there’d be a lot more focus on making explicit things like canonical records or schema, contracts, provenance, versioning, access policies, some kind of fixed views. Things that your local fluid interface would rely on the structure for when it came to connecting to your bank and doing whatever you want with your finances.
Not all software as we think of it might disappear, but the things that are lightweight layers over something more stable could all be subsumed with tools synthesised on demand.
Perhaps, at least.
Going to entirely depend on the nature of the task and where AI pricing goes in the future.
Would you like to spend $0.10 on every task or would you like to spend $1.00 to make an app that does it free for you forever?
I don't think it'll be one or the other.
But also I don't see things like video games ever being replaced by 1 off AI. If for no other reason then the fact that a lot of games are fun because of multiplayer capabilities. That's not something you can do a 1 and done with AI (unless you only want to play games with family and close friends).
With the caveat that literal today's models are not allowed to run code themselves but instead give you the code in the chat window and ask you to run it yourself for security and safety reasons. But the capability is there.
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
So it would really be beneficial for the LLMs to be able to have their own environments to write and run code, but also to store those programs for later use automatically.
Computers can do that!
The LLMs empower for building, the determinism improves output-expectation alignment. It’s fundamentally an on device software factory, hypervisor, and storage system.
Apps will become barely visible data providers. Some will provide specialized widgets for those cases where a specialized UI is needed. And data will be designed to inter operate.
I have reached this conclusion from a specific example I'm working on, more details in this blog post if you pardon a link to a website of mine: https://cloudywithachanceoflatency.net/blog_02-how-llm-accel...
I doubt it. Most people would rather stab at their phone to download an app that just does what they want than explain to a chatbot over a period of minutes/hours and several reiterations to get it to spew out what they want, let alone what kind of software they want it to make for them. Most people can barely articulate what they want in the first place.
The market for applications isn't going anywhere and neither is the OS. I can't imagine booting a computer directly into a chat window where I have to explain to a bot what I wish would show up on my screen, where on my screen, and how it should look. What a total nightmare that would be!
Even if what passes for "AI" these days was as smart and capable as the computers on Star Trek (and it very much isn't) you wouldn't want to ask it for everything. Even the Enterprise had an OS that people interacted with. What they also had though was an OS with configurable interfaces that people could customize according to their current task and preferred workflow.
That sort of thing is maybe possible in the future for "AI" empowered operating systems we might live to see, but 90% of the people using computers aren't going to bother with any of that, just like they've never seen the settings/options in most of their applications or their operating system right now. Not because it couldn't make their time working the computer better, but because they just can't be bothered.
The writer of this piece remembers how, as a child, computers promised to let him write his own software and games and it seemed like there were endless possibilities until the reality that programing takes effort killed a little of that enthusiasm (although not enough that he didn't eventually become a programmer), but many people never see a computer as anything more than a means to an end or a device for mainly passive content consumption.
“Go play video games for me”
“Go create music for me”
Idk. Seems like there is still use for apps.
I don't understand why people are still thinking that clicking on stuff will still be a desirable thing in the future.
What happens after an input is still the best part of a UI. We like seeing/hearing/feeling things in different ways.
LLMs are the first machine learning models that blatantly and regularly produce incorrect output and we have been brainwashed into accepting that. An application on the other hand can be exhaustively verified. There is no comparison.
If we don't assume up front that AIs are good enough for at least one of those things, then there's no conversation to be had. Personally I'd rather have a conversation than not have a conversation, but you do you.
"ChatGPT, please send <username> a message with the following contents: <content>. Oh, what platform? Create the platform to send the message for me. That username doesn't mean anything on this brand new platform? Uhhhh" [insert step where the AI-psychotic decides to give up on communicating with humans and tells ChatGPT to roleplay as the person they intended to message, I guess]
In other news, switching from gas guzzlers to electric cars had the unfortunate side effect of highways disappearing.
To me they're failing to see the even bigger picture that maybe even Hey itself is outdated in the Ai era and not only is its Ruby framework antiquated... the whole Hey service is too.
I suppose if you break your glasses, squirt real hard, and drop down about 30 IQ points, then sure.
We're extremely far from anyone, even those with the most interest and capability, giving a practical demo of this future you're suggesting.
What we all see irrefutably happening is some new people are just barely able to do slightly more than they used to. That's the impact we'd expect from a better search engine and a better "I'm feeling lucky" button which, of course, is what this era of AI is.
Yes, absolutely. This is a very far future. But that future is (maybe, possibly, hopefully) coming, unlike this other future which is absolutely never coming.
Having AI "do the task directly" sounds just as miserable as anything else people keep insisting is the future. We can't rely on probabilistic methods. We will still need humans in the loop to pin down the deterministic parts and also the parts we intended (often the same, but not always).
What else did you have in mind?
If AI keeps getting better, then it is inevitable that voice conversations will become the dominant way in which mostbpeople use most computers for most tasks most of the time. It's just part of human nature and there's no way around it. The only way this doesn't happen is if AI never becomes good enough to support it.
Personally, I'm not a fan of voice input. But I want AI to get better. And the future where voice conversations work well enough to be used as the main HCI method is inevitably also the future where voice conversations are used as the main HCI method by most people. I'm hopeful for technological progress, that's all. It's just that you cannot have this progress but not have people take advantage of it in this exact way.
Compare it to the future where most people vibe code their own apps, which has zero chance of happening no matter how good AI gets.
Sounds more realistic than what this blog post is proposing. Meta also tried releasing a phone, how did that go?
Muse on the other hand is the polished version of what OpenClaw should have been and Meta appears to have given a lot of thought about it more than this blog post.
I don't think we need yet another phone.
> Perhaps I have no imagination, but I don't feel like having an LLM make applications on my phone. I want good software that someone that I trust wrote.
I do not use LLM either, and do not intend to do. I can write my own programs. Even if someone does want to use LLM, it should neither be required nor expected nor the default (and there are also reasons why I think that it should be discouraged to use LLM too much); you should be able to write the scripts and programs by yourself if you want to do it that way (and the computer made to make this possible to do without LLM), even if some people can make LLM to do it at their option, but it should not to require LLM and AI.
I also think that the computer that can start with a programming language such as BASIC or Forth (without first needing menus and GUI to access all of the programs) is useful, and that it is not as good that many modern computers do not do like that.
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It seems to me as if the current entrepreneur playbook largely is to run really fast and hope the judicial system doesn't catch up.
You still gotta write the post, though, because otherwise what you get is a circulating Twitter post.
I'll write something more fulfilling about this next week, I think.
Honestly, as a long time Emacs user, agents are amazing because when all your functionality and data lives in open source code and text files, the world is literally your oyster.
The advantage of the Apple approach is that the user’s data is instantly available across third party apps. For example, instead of needing to build (or import) a whole CalDAV apparatus to be able to build a little calendar-based todo app, you can just use the system calendar API and let the OS do the heavy lifting, making your app much more lightweight and instantly usable with almost no user configuration. This naturally applies for scripts and agent skills, too.
It's an app with an audience of just me. That's the point. You're not supposed to want it. You have your own problems.
'Transacting' requires not only identity but accountability, a completely controlled-by-you phone cannot meaningfully transact separately from you.
I feel like a lot of new security concerns would be created.
Problem with sandboxes is that it doesn't solve the "user who doesn't know or care" problem.
If you have to give access to particular files to an app, your average user will just give access to all. Someone installing tiktok doesn't look at the permissions...
The best thing would be for apps to operate on their own copy of a file regardless. But that doesn't stop bad apps from leaking importsnt files. Unless files can be signed as being for x thing requiring y special permissions as granted by the originator and not the user.
The crowd on here we can't to be able to truly own our devices. But I think for the safety of the average person they should be locked down by default, same as dev mode on android devices where you accept liability for doing silly things.
I didn't submit this! Happy to chat about it, but I feel like I was pretty clear in the post that I wasn't bidding for the front page.
The barrier to entry is lower now because of AI. Even though I code, I ask the AI to write a lot of little helper apps for my wife who homeschools our kids, and I don't code review many of them. I only do enough user testing to ensure they function as requested.
Armed with this knowledge, I have tried in vain to get various family and friends who are not technically minded to do anything like this. In some cases, they just tell me that they can't think of anything the AI can help with.
Many things that seem simple to them are more complex, and they can't tell the difference between simple apps that the AI can knock out in a few minutes and larger projects that require internet hosting and/or vastly more AI credits than they would ever be willing to pay for.
By far the biggest problem is that many of them are not very good at describing what they want. For simple apps, you can go back and forth with the AI to ask for changes, but the more complex the solution, the more its becomes like a traditional engineering design project where carefully though out design of features and their interactions are critical for success. The new "code" may be more like human language, but the user facing details must still be specified.
Claude especially, where you might say “how can I do task xyz more quickly” and Claude responds with a little JS app. This creates an expectation that it’s possible to do anything if you ask Claude right.
I have seen this first hand where my partner - a deeply non technical person - came to ask what an API token is and how she can get one for Canva. Claude was busy automating her Canva -> Pinterest workflow.
She now has a half dozen of these things and hunts through her Claude chats to reuse them.
LLMs are simply the latest incarnation of VB6 + Clippy.
In my opinion, an OS that hosts a local agent can produce things for you on the fly in response to a particular task in addition to the baseline set of features.
Too often have I ran into "you can't do that" in operating systems, especially Macos where you either have to buy a paid app to implement what they should have already, or what you want is niche enough that you have to build it yourself.
Plus and agent can operate across your hardware including the cloud. I could ask something like "graphics cards are expensive and always out of stock so when some pop up can you notify me and show me the price etc" and then receive a rich alert on whatever device I happen to be using at the time it happens, once agents are aware of where we are and what we're doing (yes, it will be pretty dystopian with current governments and the drooling animals who vote for tribalism).
Or being able to be like "I want my photo gallery to show animated thumbnails when I've taken a series of photos of the same subject. Oh, little bit slower like one every second thanks" boom done.
And much UI will becomes defunct in the first place, UI only exists because of many annoying discrete steps we have to do to get something done. If I can just ask an agent to do the thing I want then I don't care about that.
It's like how I only need to make a PowerPoint now and then and every time I open it I've completely forgotten where all of the stupid fucking buttons are in the stupid fucking ribbon bullshit they made.
If you look at software like sophisticated database kernels they bypass the OS almost completely because they can reimplement a better OS in userspace, using the kernel as little more than a device driver. Over time this has become more common, not less. OS like Linux have actively embraced this role.
Being able to effectively specialize the OS for specific applications has large benefits. It is a specialized skill but not unusually expensive to implement.
Roblox is a game where you make the game. This sounds like an OS where you make the OS.
Probably could have spelled it out more, being too pithy perhaps
On the other hand, that’s just traditional banner/video style advertising where the goal is to force specific content on the user. If someone wants to spread the word about their product or service, I’m sure they’ll pay money to advertising services that use agents to inject their message into the global context. This is happening already, we just talk about it in the frame of “dead internet theory” and AI influencers, etc. Anywhere that content is being produced and consumed is an opportunity for the message to be nudged in favor of the person paying money.
I guess it really is over if this is what professionals (supposedly) seem to think.
OP is right though, an OS remains an OS, same as it’s always been. What’s changed is how we interact with it and what we lay on top of it. Nothing magical or philosophical about it.
The most recent was Loris Degioanni yesterday in a conference talk.
I think saying " This dumb dumb doesn't know what a device driver is" is a very incorrect read since you know, he's written a bunch of them
Finding some balance between access and safety for vibe-conjuring parts of the OS in a way that's still powerful but won't accidentally nuke or corrupt itself.
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The physical device that is best for me is probably the best car compromise for several million other people.
if my ex calls and I want my glass brick to flash the "help me" in SOS on the screen, play Hector Berlioz, and dim all the lights in the room – I can have that. I don't have to want the same thing a million other people do.
Yes, I'm sure we all have horror stories about spreadsheets that got out of hand, but that ignores the thousands (or more) spreadsheets that are silently productive everyday.
First, the halting problem is only undecidable on arbitrary programs. Here we would be writing programs specifically to be easy to prove correct. In fact, we would be developing programs and proof at the same time.
Second, determinism is a nice property, but it's independent of whether you can proof software correct.
Have a look at eg randomised quicksort or the 'expected linear time minimum-spanning-tree algorithm' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_linear_time_MST_algor...
Or have a look at HyperLogLog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog
HyperLogLog only gives you a probabilistic approximation of the true number of distinct items. Here the proof would be about the probability that you are within some acceptable window around the true answer.
I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that.
Trying to correctly render a vertical blinking cursor on top of proportional fonts took me ages to get right...ish.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1421/sharp-pc-1246/
This was the very opposite of unsatisfying. I don’t recognise this idea that computers sucked.
AI-assisted coding is, to me, way more soul-destroying than hitting the limits of a simple home computer. In most regards I feel like I have reached the end of my interest in computing, and the pivot I had in mind — teaching - looks like it has been joy-deadened too. Nobody is going to want to learn how anything that is not AI actually works, tech people insist that AI will replace (they say augment, they mean replace) teachers and trainers, politicians seem to be listening, and non-tech people now increasingly resent technology.
I barely recognise the industry I spent my life in; I do not recognise the evident enthusiasm for a world that is abandoning a whole, transformative pedagogy in favour of the programming equivalent of games consoles: button pushing vibes.
I am not at all of the opinion that AI has no value, though it does not have anywhere close to the value people insist it must have for me. I am learning, trying to find an ethical angle on it that doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable and exhausted by the hype.
But it is the final nail in the coffin of the joy of tech work for me, and as a single middle-aged man I perceive this as life changing and very likely life-shortening, in the way that psychologically unhealthy things are a health risk for older adults: unless I find something that gives my work life a sense of connected purpose again, I figure I will be gone before the Spectrum makes it to fifty.
So yeah, no. No.
I disagree with most of your post, but this one the most.
Non-tech people already resent technology... Try and sit next to a non tech person use a desktop pc. It wasn't until the smart phone that the average person started to use technology like you or I recognise. And that's only because it's been simplified to the extreme for them. (I don't blame them btw).
AI is such a step change for learning and teaching... For anyone who is inquisitive. Ask it endless questions, explore ideas, get it to generate images to help you...
Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?
For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...
In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way. I just tried hard and remained curious to understand what this "instruction" was and how I could give it to computers...
May be your falling the same way for LLMs now..
20 goto 10
20 goto 10
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QBasic's bultin help/documentation was good enough for me..
Are you telling us the only reason why making things was fun is because it made you "special"? And now that anyone can do it it isn't worth it for you anymore?
That's the wrong reason to do something.
You can and should still write most of the code yourself and use AI to assist when you get stuck. Apart from saving yourself some hours because you no longer hit dead ends on google, I don't understand how that's meaningfully different from using a search engine and finding solutions on StackOverflow and GitHub. I don't even understand how people think this traditional workflow I'm suggesting is any slower than reviewing LLM output either. It takes the same cognitive load and the same time in the end. The only people who believe they can go faster and reduce cognitive load aren't just inexperienced, but also seem to have ADHD or something. Like they just wanna bask in the vibes of the machine-generated text scrolling by.
If your goal is to make something you're going to live with and maintain long term, or is more generally the foundation of a bigger idea, you can't ignore any part of the code or delegate it away. It's still writing that you're bound by like any other document.
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Imagine saying that to a random dude with a map and that should give you a good idea on how many info you're leaving out. You can say that the AI will infere those but that seems to be the common fallacy of AI enjoyers: They're always assuming the AI will magically find out the missing information from their prompt somehow.
I have Organic Maps installed on my phone and within a few minutes (faster than my car warming up) I can set a multi stop route (you can bookmark places). Training a random user to use such apps is also equally fast. The same happens with various pro tools: once trained, a user can be very fast with them.
Wow that's slow. I can do the same in Google Maps in seconds. Can you tell me what I'm missing? I'm definitely missing something.
> just drive easy for a couple minutes.
Sometimes it is wild to me how two people can look at the same information and come to completely different conclusions.
As best as I can tell, the only constraint the really matters right now is availability of compute, or as a buddy of mine put it "GPU GO BRRRRRRRRRRR!"
A tool for generating a report for September 2026 is no more expensive than an agent generating a report for September 2026. But that tool is useless for you in October 2026. You'll need to generate a whole new tool for October 2026, and generating 2 tools costs as much as generating 2 reports so you're not saving anything.
Making a tool that can generate a report for any single month can easily cost 10 times more than a single report, entirely due to the extra code flow analysis required to extract the right variables in the right places. And that's without any UI. If you want UI that's another several times more tokens because UI is hard. Also it will suck compared to a simple chat window where you can ask the assistant for anything and it will understand. If you want UI that's better than the chat, that alone costs you more than everything you spent so far.
All in all, your permanent solution starts paying for itself in about 4 to 6 years, assuming you never had to update how the report is generated in the meantime.
Or you could have a very simple, very cheap script that only gets run once then gets deleted (or even better, kept for future reference to make future report scripts even cheaper to generate).
Note that this is all in the hypothetical future where AI is actually capable of one shotting such a task. If it makes mistakes, then human-made apps are still the most cost-effective option and this whole discussion is moot.
Remember when everyone was talking about treating computers as cattle rather than pets?
This seems like a weird inversion. Programs as pets instead of cattle. Toxoplasmosis, ahoy...
Think of all those bad sci-fi movies where aliens take over Earth, enslave all humans and treat them like cattle. Very competent cattle that's put in charge of local governments, scientific research etc. but very much still cattle where individuals are entirely interchangeable and killing them is just everyday work. This is me and AI assistants. (I'm the aliens.)
Pros and cons to code being cheap to generate now, it’s always about tradeoffs. I don’t want to build cars, I want to drive cars.
People suck at "good enough". All major engineering disasters were something "good enough" for somebody. People burn down their houses with "good enough" electrical work.
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Because Linux doesn’t offer a rich set of system services built around the needs of desktop users and exposed through curated APIs.
Linux can’t be better at providing a shared calendar API or a shared photos library API, or one of dozens of other APIs because Linux just doesn’t have those features.
Some particular DE could offer those features, but then who is going to build the app ecosystem around that? And isn’t it going to suck when you want to make a Linux native photos app but it doesn’t work on Ubuntu because your LLM was trained on KDE?
My photos are not text files.
Same here. I can understand indifference, but this I don't get.
FFS I even loved playing with calculators!
Unless you're complaining you can't be paid to do it the old way. But none of us were paid to have fun, we were paid to deliver results.
I am not entitled for things to continue as they were, but I can still feel sad about it, you know.