Comment by jggonz
1 month ago
I am not sure I will ever get this to protected mode... The goal was to have something running on slower, older hardware, and once protected mode comes into play, we're letting go many of the constraints that make this an interesting experiment.
Even though I've relied on AI to hammer out the assembly, it has been very educational iterating on it. You end up learning the techniques that other operating systems used to get applications to perform well on slow machines.
Yeah, I think the ability to move at pace helps and especially when you get stuck at some sort of intractable bug, in realmode especially, claude/gpt is unbelievably good at identifying and proposing the fix.
THAT is part of the issue with it though, those length debugging sessions where you prod and poke and have to hold complex interactive segments in your head is what gives you that deep understanding of a piece of software. You do lose that when you throw the AI at it. This is part of my motivation for handwriting 'offline' all my code for these types of project. Have a doc to work from but otherwise wetware is doing the heavy lifting.
This isn't efficient use of time at all and professionally a dead end. But as a pasttime/hobby for an enthusiast it opens a door that would be closed (project like yours and indeed mine) while still having it grounded in our own work.