← Back to context

Comment by thehamkercat

11 hours ago

Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid

From the GitHub page:

    This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses:

    - An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night.
    - An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.

  • It looks to me like they just wanted to distinguish their product from other AI agents/sandboxes, so they called it an OS to make it sound bigger and better.

  • Wow this is really poor justification for its name, the folks at cloudflare really should not be overloading the term "Operating System" pointlessly like this.

    • They even put it in quotes, because they know what they did.

      Maybe just take out the word "traditional" and be honest: "This is not an operating system. We're redefining the term because it is convenient for marketing."

  • the people criticizing the vibecoded name knows what they meant, it is just not correct. It is the same as vegan meat.

    • Excluding vegetables from what convey “meat” was also not correct around 1300-1500. Definitions changes with usage and only time will tell the future of vegan steaks, meats, milks, sauvages, butters and other parties.

      > food, nourishment, sustenance

      > Narrower sense of "flesh of warm-blooded animals killed and used as food" is attested from c. 1300

      https://www.etymonline.com/word/meat

Mostly to get trolls to retweet and complain about it for free advertising. It's working. ;)

I agree, it has now become a cliche buzzword that product managers slap on boring non-technical things to make them sound important.

Isn’t there even a bug tracker that some company calls an ‘issue OS’ or something absurd?

Because AI enables a new layer more akin to an actual OS. But also because I imagine they all want all the things running through them and an OS is the widest net they can cast in that direction.

Andy Jassy et al didn't quite name it that, but AWS was being thought of internally as "Internet OS".

I think because the idea of an "agent operating system" is starting to feel more and more inevitable. Since I can use AI to:

  - Pull information from external sources
  - Transform and/or augment that information
  - Publish information

I almost do not need a traditional OS anymore. This obviously isn't entirely true: I still use it to interact directly with humans, and it's the way I access my LLM. For now.