Hey, all. I really don't know what to do with a post like this.
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.
Personally, I'd like to hear the full pitch, and I suspect many others would too. If the ideas are interesting enough for you to dedicate the next N years of your life to, I'm probably willing to spend 10 minutes reading the blog post. Particularly from you, a known-good writer.
Sounds like "secure phone for mass vibeware." Probably containers, authentication, auto analysis, protected user data, etc. Just diff enough from apple/andr that it can't be slapped in overnight.
I’m already edging in the article’s direction on my desktop. I recognised a lot of this, and it makes a great deal of sense.
The only question is if it’ll still make sense in six months, or if an even more unreasonable approach will be the correct one. Feels like a singularity.
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.
You are overthinking it :) You are one of the most interesting people on HN. I am sure others think along those lines too and would love to learn more about what you are building and where the industry is going. Others can just tune it out.
Hi Thomas, I think you're being too defensive. It's ok, I look forward to your technical posts, on what you imaging this OS powered by AI to be. Will be a fun ride.
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).
We were on a call recently where I mentioned that as a fly user SDLC and declarative config was more important than ever, and so I was pushing for sprites to have OCI images.
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.
> 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.
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.
A post a few days ago turned funtional core, imperative shell into deterministic core, non-deterministic shell. And a comment [1] on that discussed turning that into "slop core, artisinal shell". Which makes a lot of sense actually despite feeling the wrong round initially. And maybe what an OS needs to do is to support that, at a higher level. What I think we will need is strong isolation - all the software might be coming from the "same place", but do we trust that place? Certainly not currently!
Circa 2005 I was thinking about "sessile robots" and how even smartphones of the time had enough sensors to know you were putting them in your bag and then riding on the bus and acting appropriately.
The model I see is that it is like a butler instead of a home computer, like you are driving into a strange town and looking for food and you are not going to open the McDonald's app but instead your agent does a search and through a conversational recommender you get sent somewhere. It might be sitting in your pocket the whole time and you are talking to it through something like AirPods. Maybe you put on smart glasses and it can show you things.
Apple can't give you the A.I.-native phone because it is too dependent on the app economy. For a few months I've been asking "Who is working on this?" and figured it was one of those cursed ideas that Silicon Valley would be unable to fund much like the pharmaceutical-industrial complex of Cambridge was unable to fund Facebook. I was expecting it to come out of some hungry Chinese manufacturer so I'm happy to see another horse in this race.
(e.g. I love the image that Meta has developed around Muse which makes it look like it is a "butler" when it is really much more like the old Kraftwerk song where "I program my home computer")
I appreciate you saying that. I have a modus operandi with posts like this when I'm really trying to get something across and persuade, where I'll saturate it with technical details, and here I'm literally handwaving, which makes me uncomfortable (on Hacker News, I mean --- I'm comfortable with it everywhere else).
And then of course it's super self-indulgent of me just to write navel-gazing stuff like this. But I'm an HN person first and an entrepreneur second, so here we are.
I am thankful people are being so nice about it though!
1. When you write a comment in a discussion of an article, be upfront with being the author. It took me a while to understand that from your comment. "Author here" is a thing.
2. Your article itself doesn't have clear authorship stated. At the very bottom there is a copyright notice, but that's pretty generic and not a single person either. Just place your name at the top together with a date. Not everybody knows you or follows your blog.
3. When I read this ...
> When I was a little kid, a family friend sold us our first “computer” — scare quotes because I’m pretty sure it was a VTech Laser 200 clone, a chiclet keyboard Z80 that ran off cassette tapes and plugged into our TV.
.. I prepared to stop reading since .. how is that not a computer? After another paragraph or two which just felt like rambling, I gave up.
with 3. being the most prominent one.. I made it a little further than that "hot take" but a few more paragraphs in the thoughts expressed seemed neither novel nor to go anywhere. SaaSpocalypse but on localhost... shrugs
Reading this, my first thought is to worry about the security aspects of it. But if you're the author, I expect that you've spent a few brain cells in that direction...
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.
The author, as a kid, believed computers where like a genie that could manifest anything they ask for. It seems to be a case of wishful thinking of a kid.
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...
Why the hostility? The author has stated that he believes AI will alter how we think about operating systems. I don't think that's actually true, but I can see how this line of inquiry could lead to discoveries about how AI will change the line between installed software created by others and software that is "created" by users themselves. It's reasonable to suppose those discoveries in turn will result in new products. I wish him well and hope to hear more.
@tptacek I think my question about your post is this — right now people rely on a lot of apps written by professionals for things like mobile banking, messaging, medical providers, mobile payments, and subscription services (music, tv, etc). The interests of the app publishers aren’t aligned with total user freedom — banking app developers don’t want a totally malleable OS where there are no process separations or trust partitions. Rather, they want to rely on OS level guarantees that their code is isolated from other apps, that the binaries are signed, that the platform is somehow trusted.
I love your idea of an OS where users write their own apps as they want. But if they want to connect to third party services or use commercial software, won’t there still have to be a lot of security guarantees? I don’t just mean the depressing “browsers must implement DRM or you can’t watch streaming video.” I mean “how will medical providers trust your device enough to give you your lab results” if you are thinking of majorly changing the mobile device security model.
It’s not a hostile question, I’m genuinely curious about this design tradeoff.
Doesn't sound hostile at all. These are the real hard questions. The 2 major mobile platforms don't seem to want this to happen at all, but you can work around that by building your own platform. But the largest API vendors don't want it either, and they're much harder to work around.
I recently replaced my $HEALTHCARE_APP with the PWA of their website. It was the *exact* same. The app was just a webview (and a pretty good one at that!)
It makes me really question how much “security” these services need when they have websites that can do everything the app can do.
Have you seen the Googlebook? I think Google is taking the lead here with "Create a Widget". I think some have overlooked this feature or treated it as a gimmick. But this is the first step into average users building small micro apps just for themselves. I think it will go from Create a Widget to Create an App within a short period.
Banks and schools and businesses should get in the business of simply vending APIs (or MCP connections). Agents and bots are taking away the need for the endless knobs and dials of traditional software. Just expose my data securely and my agent will do what I want with it, when I need it.
"Should get", so yea, not going to happen. The most obvious should get is exactly where we are now. What you're saying is "They should be forced to" which is just what we call laws and regulations regarding digital availability. Of course this is difficult to do since they will fight back monetarily against what they would consider perverse motivation to what we are already considering perverse motivations from them.
The fear maybe a year ago was SaaSpocalypse. Why pay for Salesforce when I can vibe a CRM to my exact needs? Turns out to not be that easy.
The lion's share of value in a product like Salesforce is the ability to say "we run Salesforce" and have everyone know what you mean and have ready answers to all your problems even if they're not perfectly tailored (or cheap). Same thing with OS really. If natural language is now the most powerful programming language then having shared vocabulary on technical topics is more valuable than ever.
> The fear maybe a year ago was SaaSpocalypse. Why pay for Salesforce when I can vibe a CRM to my exact needs? Turns out to not be that easy.
In fact, it looks like the advent of AI has actually accelerated revenue growth for SaaS rather than killed it off. People simply aren't building these custom SaaS-killers as much as commenters on HN would have us believe.
My lab medical results are mine and only mine. It’s for me to decide if my device is secure enough. I do not need my insurance company to decide for me what device I should use.
Same with my money in the bank.
Streaming is fair. Netflix can dictate their rules. I can decide not to pay for their content.
While I agree in spirit: after a recent rib injury I wasn't allowed to take a picture of my own X-Ray using my phone or even have a copy sent to me since "that isn't the policy"... very hard to say that data was "mine" until it is "released" to me.
There is an infinitesimally small liability that some "other patient's" data might be visible on scanning device, a horde of companies assuring asses are covered and without a legal obligation to give me all "my" health data per visit I don't see an easy path to using our own devices soon, unfortunately.
Under the law now, at least in the US and EU, you do not have the legal authority to waive the obligations of your medical and financial service providers under regulatory law and court precedent.
If you want that power, you’ll need to get your national government to change the law.
I’d love for this to be the case, but we’re going to need laws to make it happen. Banks will have to be forced into it and probably also shielded from liability in case the user does something dumb.
Maybe we can force them into providing APIs for us while we’re at it so I don’t have to pay Plaid if I want to build an app to track my finances.
I feel like most articles challenging OSes have no idea what an OS is.
Sure question what the latest tool can offer and how to integrate with it... but that's just being an app, or a window manager, or a package manager, or a distribution, that's not challenging what the OS itself is and does.
If your OS doesn't change how a computer allocates resources, then you are talking about higher level, and that can be super valuable too, arguably more valuable, but ... that's a different thing.
PS: also chroot (half a century, just checked for the fun of it), jails, containers, VMs, etc limiting how the allocation can be done do exist and have been used for decades already.
Having built software runnging on everything from microcontrollers to cloud servers to browsers, I also have no idea what an OS is.
In the context of a microcontroller, is it an RTOS? How is that different from something like Embassy with Rust, where hardware allocation and coordination is handled more at build time and less at runtime? In the context of a something showing up on a screen, is an OS something providing a UI framework and hardware abstraction - something like Win32 or Cocoa? What does that make Chrome?
In 2006 it felt like an answer to the question "what is an OS" was straightforward. In 2026, I'm rather confident that I don't have a single, simple answer. If there were ever a time to re-assess what we thought we knew about computing - now seems like a good time to do it.
As far as I am concerned an OS is really simple to define. Its the thing that manages hardware resources on a device to allow other software to run using said resources.
LLMs are not OSes and never will be, they will always need some software to first bootstrap the hardware before the software which processes the weighting can begin.
Its like we need Richard Stallman to come and argue the difference between GNU and Linux again!
If we ask this a different way, is there a single self executable file when written to the sector of the disk the hardware looks for can contain the instructions for the hardware and the weights all in one?
I can't thing of any informational theory reason why this can't be the case. The only thing I can think of structuring such far more complex and less worthwhile than just having separate layers. Dealing with this biological/intelligence mess in humans is already hard enough as it is.
I hear what you’re saying, but we don’t have a word for that different thing. OS means the kernel. But OS also means the entire distribution - all of macOS, all of iOS, all of windows, Ubuntu, Android, etc.
Until we have a standard word for the ui “shell” that comes out of the box with the OS distribution, people - including me - are gonna call (and think of it) as the OS. Or part of the os. Or something like that.
> "But it booted straight into BASIC. That’s all it did. I was, like, 8 years old. I wasn’t about to learn BASIC. What I learned instead: computers were not as awesome as I’d imagined."
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.
I think you were the exception. Most kids never even knew what BASIC was. If there was a game already on the computer, they'd be happy to play it. If they really liked the game they might learn how to start the game if it wasn't already running, but they didn't care about doing anything else. Kids who were into computers looked at a computer and saw endless possibility. Everybody else played sports outside, watched TV, or hung out with their friends.
Probably for quite a while kids were more likely to have a console than access to an actual computer. But if you had a computer it was not like you could rely on having someone else around to start up the game for you. In fact there was a good chance that your access to a computer was arranged by adults who specifically expected you to learn how to use it.
It was probably a function of not just personality type but education. For whatever reason I was taught basic in elementary school as a millennial and it left an impression.
In that area, kids with computers that booted straight to basic like the spectrum, bbc micro, c64 etc fell into two camps -- those who were interested, and those whose parents were interested. I suspect the former were more numerous, as to have a parent interested enough to spend a fortune on a computer without the pester power of the kid feels quite niche.
The vast majority of kids never touched computers, other than maybe running logo at school to move a turtle around.
Most kids who were only interested in a game had a NES or Sega console.
Of the former group, the awe began when you wrote in the example program from the manual or magazine, made it do something, and then changed it. Even something as simple as changing from 3 lives to 99.
Your priors are all out of whack. Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8. Programming is much more accessible now than then, but the overwhelming majority of people still don’t know any JavaScript or python or anything else.
Programming (by humans) is less accessible in 2026 because most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment and they don't include a user-friendly programming instruction manual (graphing calculators may be an exception however). And before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would need to write their own programs, so systems were designed to support that. Vibe programming (by LLMs) is more accessible now however.
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.
> Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8.
I learned it at age 12. It was pretty much as the author described, except in my case the "computer" was a Texas Instruments teletype, a phone, and a 300 baud modem. Plus a booklet with reddish cover introducing the BASIC language and how to connect to our school account at Washtenaw Computing Services. That was the beginning of a life-long journey with computers.
I was really surprised by the article, I assumed it was going to be the same as my experience which was amazement at having the ability to write instructions that caused the system to do stuff, like make dumb games initially in basic and then better games in assembly.
I think you’re half right. To echo the other comments, I think 8 is too young for most kids to get into BASIC. I learnt programming on BASIC but I was 12 or so and had a teacher and hence structured guidance. I don’t know that I had the mental capacity to self-teach that kind of programming even at 12, let alone 8!
But 8 is not too early to learn programming as such, because my kids started around that age. Only they started creating dumb games using Scratch in a modern browser on a full-fledged modern OS. The environment you start with probably matters a lot for how much you take to it.
You were the exception too. A PC was one of the most expensive items in my house when we bought it. The computer table it sat on was the second most. I was so afraid of doing anything on it that'd break it. Heck I freaked out one time when I shut it down from the power button directly.
My Acorn BBC Model B booted straight into BBC BASIC as well, and I too thought it was awesome and taught myself BASIC straight away, and then 6502 assembler and latterly BCPL and so on. I was even younger than OP.
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'm not even that old, but totally agree with this sentiment. Going to miss those times. It's amazing being able to build whatever you want now, but it's bittersweet because if you truly wanted to learn how to do it, you could do it yourself.
I don't understand this. Back in the early days of the internet, you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books or knowing someone. Now though? You can learn all of it, and find the resources almost instantly. Want to build a computer, self host, program, you have millions of resources at your hand.
I remember getting magazines with basic games, where the full syntax was printed out. I would type it in and save to floppies on my Apple 2e - which my mother purchased second hand.
I ended up a systems programmer in this doomed industry. BASIC on a Z80 didn't get me there (exploits on a DG/UX at a library system did.) Different people, different vectors.
I refuse the accusation - I had a very good idea what BASIC was even at 5 years old. QBASIC was the program that allowed you to open GORILLA.BAS and play the Gorilla fruit throwing game.
..at that time I have to admit, most of what I saw there went over my head. I understood the concept of program code, but had very little idea of what was going on, but wanted to learn. Eventually I started modifying the code, and started making my own stuff, driven mostly by determination rather than any understanding of what was going on.
Reading through all the comments, I think there’s also a bit of a generational gap here.
There’s a huge difference between a kid turning on a Commodore 64 or an Apple II and being dropped into the relatively no-frills versions the BASIC interpreter versus a kid in the early ’90s who had a DOS machine with MS-DOS 5 bundled with QBasic which IMHO is a more representative example of a “batteries included” BASIC environment that was significantly more user-friendly.
I also encountered QBASIC as an elementary school kid - it felt like the closest thing to sorcery. People who grew up in the age of the internet really underestimate how awesome it was to be able to just be able to place the cursor on a more obscure command (like PEEK/POKE or POINT) and see something like this:
Returns the current graphics cursor coordinates or the color attribute of a specified pixel.
'This example requires a color graphics adapter.
SCREEN 1
LINE (0, 0)-(100, 100), 2
LOCATE 14, 1
FOR y% = 1 TO 10
FOR x% = 1 TO 10
PRINT POINT(x%, y%);
NEXT x%
PRINT
NEXT y%
I don't know what's wrong with my perspective. I cannot relate to this at all.
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.
> 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.
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.
Let me add my voice to that. It's strange to me that people are now talking about LLM integration in daily-driving their computer as if it would be something desirable. As if being able to "write one's own programs" directly wouldn't be enough; as if the focus shouldn't be on just making that as easy as possible, so that you can just type out what you want instead of expecting a nondeterministic system to infer your meaning. And that's before considering the security risks.
It feels to me rather analogous to being in a foreign country and, rather than learning the local language, you get to hire this translator that works for absurdly cheap, but you have no real idea of the accuracy (because you didn't learn!) and for some reason the translator is only able to speak while physically holding your wallet.
Oddly enough, from what I can tell, AI-powered translation services are not capturing a lot of imagination, while interest in AI-powered (human) language tutoring is booming (at least on the supply side).
> you should be able to write the scripts and programs by yourself if you want to do it that way
Having chat gpt one write me a powershell script took a 3 hour manual task using software and made it a 10 minute task which I can repeat any time I fancy should I need to.
Writing something similar would've taken me an hour+ just to dig out the key pieces of information I needed to start in a language I am proficient in. Why would I waste my time?
Nothing. Thomas, as most ambitious start up founders do according to PG, is living in the future.
There are already a few places that are living in the future in this respect. Silicon Valley is one of them: an unknown person working on a strange-sounding idea won't automatically be dismissed the way they would back home ...
The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could.
In my opinion, this post misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete. But it's not the idea of the OS that's outdated - it's the idea of apps. Why would you ever want to ask an AI to make an app for you to complete some task, if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly? The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.
I've seen a few posts of the form "why would you ever want to use anything else than AI from now on?" by now. My counterpoints would be:
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.
Those are all techbical limitations that will be solved with time. In 5 years I would be surprised if we do NOT have an AI as smart as today's frontier models, that runs completely locally, and has a real time voice interface.
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.
We are talking about a hypothetical future where coding AIs are good enough, cheap enough and ubiquitous enough that not just expert programmers, but everybody is capable of vibe coding exactly what they need, to the point they actually reach for coding AIs and not the app store with ready-made apps. That future is still far away, at least 5 years, probably closer to 10-15. In that hypothetical future, most of the problems you're talking about would be solved, or else we wouldn't have that future yet.
> if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly?
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).
If it costs $0.10 to do the task once, then you can be sure as hell it costs orders of magnitude more than $1 to vibe code a whole damn app that does that thing, especially if you want good user experience which is the whole point of custom vibe coded apps. Whereas the App Store will have an inferior, mass-market version of what you want actually priced $1.
I imagine the future of computer interaction could evolve into a split model combining foundational capabilities that just make sense to be pre-built, tested and shared deterministic code - codecs, numerical solvers, geometry kernels, databases and transactional tools, compilers, theorem provers, cryptography, etc. - with a fluid interaction layer that accesses either local or cloud-provided versions of those foundational capabilities and is capable of synthesising any tools it needs where it would be helpful to build it first - either as a one-off or something to cache - for anything that can’t just be done as a task.
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.
An AI assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. An application written by an AI assistant, if it doesn't just call an LLM at runtime, will mostly likely produce the same answer for the same inputs. That is, unless there's something intrinsic to its business logic that makes it nondeterministic.
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
And when applicable, the program would be much more efficient than the LLM.
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.
A *human* assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. At some point, we'll need to stop treating computers as instruction executors and start treating them as autonomous agents. Non-determinism isn't a bug to be fixed, it's just the reality of working with this new kind of machines, and operators of those machines need to embrace that fact, like they did for human assistants.
I want an agent studio and execution sandbox where my LLM driven assistant builds and maintains my apps with a receipt or transcript like history of what it did to create each app. Determinism built per use case with non deterministic assistance orchestrating the build and management layer. Extra credit if I can trivially share and collaborate with others per “deterministic silo” via a shared link. Something like Claude Code + AWS Lambda|(Docker|Podman) + Tangled.org with LLM code generation for my phone and workstation.
The LLMs empower for building, the determinism improves output-expectation alignment. It’s fundamentally an on device software factory, hypervisor, and storage system.
> Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete.
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.
The cognitive dissonance is astounding in AI circles. The vast majority of people have a personal computer in their pocket and they use it the vast majority of the time to scroll Instagram, play games, and occasionally interact with their bank and other social services. People who have laptops and desktop computers have them for specialized tasks they already do. None of the vast majority of users who buy their phone when the screen cracks and the battery stops working care about the agentic AI world because their phone already does everything they want to do.
Okay, I went too far with that one sentence. Can we all pretend I have instead said "this model will be obsolete for most, not all, but most productivity apps and most, not all, but most office tools"?
This reminds me the car industry touchscreen craze: if you can paint anything and control anything via the touchscreen, then the only thing you need is the touchscreen, right?
Absolutely agree.
At the start of the year when Opus 4.6 came out, I remember my co-worker showing me a bunch of apps he made for himself to make himself more productive.
Fast forward a few months, and most of those apps are abandonware. Not that he's not as productive, he just skipped the middlemen (the apps), and started directly asking the agent to do those things.
> Why would you ever want to ask an AI to make an app for you to complete some task, if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly?
Given the current trends in predictive language models, once users are able to articulate their needs with clarity and precision, conventional software development may become obsolete.
It is not clear whether models will be both capable enough and cost effective enough but not as capable to wipe us all out. The outcome is a tiny sliver of possible futures and even then likely short-lived.
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).
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.
Like browsing TikTok or messaging your friends? People want their devices to work like their friends’ devices do. Your prediction seems to be out of touch with how and why people actually use computing devices. Nobody actually uses them to "perform tasks".
Maybe we need an app store just for agents to make purchases. Imagine a world where startups have their valuations determined by how many agents are using their apps. Those startups... Also operated by agents. We don't even need users anymore!!!
Why would you ever want a nice word processor to write a letter to someone when you could just ask AI to write the letter? Why would you ever want photo editing software when you could just tell the AI to make your picture look good? Why would you want audio recording and mixing software when you could just tell the AI to output the next Billboard 100 hit? Why would you want a camera when you could just ask AI to generate photos for you?
Inputs for the ui might be me talking, or typing, or having someone else talk or type. They might also be GPS, temperature, BLE devices nearby. Or maybe a button I smash because I don't feel like re explaining something.
What happens after an input is still the best part of a UI. We like seeing/hearing/feeling things in different ways.
It’s funny you say this because Apple resisted an App Store for apps. They originally expected web based apps. The market demanded an App Store. Remember web snippets where one could clip a portal to view a small section of a website?
There is a big misconception in your answer in that you seem to believe that an LLM would always produce (machine) code that does what the user intended, in a correct and safe manner. Neither of these assumptions is true. If you knew how LLMs are built and operate, you would know they are not reliable at all. What you might ask from an AI interpreter OS might be unique and thus might be absent from its training set and might not follow a pattern inferred from its training set either.
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.
First and foremost, I'm comparing specifically just having a suite of heavily personalized vibecoded apps like in OP blog post, versus using an agent directly. I'm comparing just these two options and nothing else.
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.
Had this thought this morning after seeing DHH announcing that Basecamp isn't writing code by hand anymore and they're using AI to write Rust for Hey's backend.
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.
> The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.
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.
> We're extremely far from anyone, even those with the most interest and capability, giving a practical demo of this future you're suggesting.
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.
> the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete
"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]
I hate that web platforms and other low level cloud infrastructure are called "apps" these days. Makes it impossible to talk about actual end user apps, vs. all the other code that's also running in addition to actual end user apps, which will remain in place even if actual end user apps become obsolete.
In other news, switching from gas guzzlers to electric cars had the unfortunate side effect of highways disappearing.
> the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.
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.
> Suddenly, everything has changed. Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8.
I've been feeling this way for months and months. If you're a person who's curious about computers and what they can do you can do for you, we just kind of talk to the computer now and ask it to do the thing. And it does it. I know most of what's happening the whole time yet it still feels like magic. We're pondering orbs all day now.
I've been a professional software person for 15+ years... my assumptions as to what the right decisions are in building software now are racked every day. And more than ever I want the device you're describing: blank slate hardware I build to do what I want how I want it to. Yes, I know that's not for everybody. But I really want to just boot up something from scratch and say, "this is how we should deal with email." Because the way I want to deal with email is the way I want to deal with email, and LLMs will help me get there. Get all this UI chrome out of my face.
Last, I've also mused (heh) about a sort of GitHub for PRDs:
> ...there’ll be thousands of times more applications that pull in 1/7th of the guts of a word processor to solve some idiosyncratic work or home life problem for somebody who doesn’t know what a for-loop is.
I think those guts-as-md-files can be maintained in on publicly available platform for all to use. Sort of a "best practices of the commons." Language-agnostic. Or rather, one language: English. Apps going forward don't necessarily need a datatable plugin — because every datatable plugin eventually has defaults or assumptions that clash with what you need — but it needs the schematics for the types of parts a datatable can have.
It's just such an interesting time to be curious about computers.
> That makes a lot of sense in a world where we’re importing all our software from strangers. It makes less sense in the world we’re heading to, where most of the software we’re carving up fiefdoms for has the same provenance.
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.
I think OP may be onto something real, while you are definitely right if we translate concepts directly. But maybe the challenge, with current platforms included, is because we try to cram identities by reference. If a phone had its own identity, with which you transact as with any party then lots of the security concerns would dissolve. To tone down crankiness, I refer to identity in the technical sense, not personality etc. This doesn’t solve the challenge but it might point to a different foundation for a security model.
I mean, everything should eh sandboxed imo. Even OS included software.
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.
The right basic idea is, the UI for "do X to Y" must combine designating which Y you want and giving permission to access that Y (and no other). It's when the OS shell separates these aspects that you have to choose between extra annoying useless permission pop-ups and any security boundaries.
(Yes reworking our all our systems in terms of capability security is a giant job. But there's a difference between a giant job and )
Nope. There has never been a "good" post written in this genre ("I'm leaving my last team, here's my new project") and I'm not going to waste interesting bits on my pro-forma transition post.
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.
From having seen what happened during the development of FirefoxOS (Boot2Gecko), from a developer point of view. My take is that the biggest hurdle are not the development of the core applications, but the approval and certifications from the various partners.
For example, some company did not like the fact that the call stack could be reverse engineered … yet they would not help you build a prototype at the pace of development (and this was back in 2011)
Then once you have a working OS, the second hurdle was to demonstrate a very high number of active users, such that they dare to even consider your new environment as a potential target. This a bootstrap challenge which is hard to achieve. To get traction from App developer implied getting traction from users, which implied having apps the users care about …
While you goal of removing the application layer sounds like a nice way to work-around the bootstrap problem, I fear you will still have it at the API level.
I wish you good luck, and I hope the landscape has changed in the last decade.
I doubt that we are entering a world where people will be using AI to write their own little apps, and that is coming from someone who does it.
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.
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.
The thing is the LLM interfaces encourage people to write their own apps.
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.
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.
I agree with BASIC taking effort, yet the baseline for effort has also changed. Over the span of my lifetime, we have gone from virtually everyone performing tasks without the aid of computers, to a few hobbyists and early adopters writing their own software, to buying software off the shelf, to using targeted online applications for free or nominal cost. At the same time people are expecting applications to be easier to use. As you suggested, constant churn in infrequently used applications can cause a lot of frustration.
Now I agree with you if the discussion is about using AI to immediately solve the problem at hand. I simply don't agree that it will end up with people creating reusable applications to perform the task. While overcoming the technical hurdles would be easy enough, I think that it takes a certain type of personality to think of creating a long term solution. Then there is describing the problem in a way that an LLM can translate into code, then there is the testing of the software generated.
> partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate.
without
> provide access to hardware resources
That’s still definitely what an OS does. The application model is often very loosely coupled. See web browsers.
A difference between embedded systems and operating systems is the ability to provide access to hardware (in such a way as to isolate and dictate communication) _dynamically_ with a-prior unknown requests.
> Here’s what’s about to happen: users will increasingly interact with stuff they themselves conjured into being.
I find this unlikely. It's far more likely that every good idea that anyone has will just be more quickly folded into software from the big software houses.
AI doesn't slow this down, because big software houses have much more money for compute and tokens.
You have a good idea for a communication add-on? Two weeks later it's available in Teams, Slack and WhatsApp.
People aren't writing their own software, for the same reason they aren't 3D printing their own items.
I don’t think the post has a lot to offer, but I will share thoughts on how a modern operating system can add _a lot of value_ both for non-agentic users and for agents.
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.
For the record: I didn't suggest this post did have a lot to offer. I didn't submit or upvote it. I pretty conscientiously kept it simple and abstract, because (as I said in a different thread) this genre of posts ("I just left the company I'm highly associated with, to do this new thing") is deeply cursed.
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.
But so much of macOS is also uninstrumentable except via undocumented APIs that are unreliable at best. Why wouldn't Linux or even FreeBSD be even better? They're not limited to content but even the source that can be updated and rebuilt to do literally anything.
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.
Linux and the BSDs might be more instrumentable, but the rest of the experience is so fragmented in comparison. Regardless of category, there is no single service or data format that everybody has agreed to use and build on top of.
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.
> Why wouldn't Linux or even FreeBSD be even better?
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?
> Forget the map, just tell me if I should get off the Eisenhower Expressway and take Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake back home?
> 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 does not answer my commute question for me. Waze finds what it believes to be the quickest route from west loop to my house, but that route is virtually never reasonable. There's only 4 reasonable routes; I just need to know which one to take.
> I’m aware that no matter what I write here, I’m going to sound like yet another startup nerd talking about “the future of programming” before announcing that I’ve joined, like, Sri Lanka’s answer to Uber or something.
> There is no better way to put it. I feel like I’ve joined a literal revolutionary war, surrounded by and fighting alongside guerilla troops, and it’s win or die.
What a load of self-aggrandizing bullshit. How do we keep minting these guys with a completely confabulated sense of perspective?
Most people don't have specialised computing / software needs or uses. In fact, they're generally Overwhelmed by the current software landscape. They want less, not more tools.
And to them software is generally a not much more than a home-screen bookmark to some client that could be a website.
The idea of software provided by domain experts has to continue even if you can write software to do what you want by chatting to AI.
"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.
If OP sees this, I really like how you are thinking about things. It's really hard to see forward. The target isn't fixed. Bell Labs, Apple, etc. were mostly solving for a fixed target. But now the target is a relationship between humans and LLMs, and the way that LLMs work has been evolving rapidly. I can think of a number of ways to conceptualize how things are moving, but they're probably all wrong. My best guesses about what needs to remain stable is that I don't think shared software is going away entirely, and I don't think all input is going to collapse to just a microphone and a camera. There is a floor on tasks that we want agents to do for us. I'd rather rename a file on my desktop or text my friend myself. Apple and Google have both tried very hard to abstract the file away from user reach, but it's such a convenient unit of sharing, that it might stick around for a while.
In some way, a "file" dates back thousands of years when ancient civilizations wrote ownership and debt and whatnot on clay slates. Then hundreds of years of paper records. It’ll probably stick around for quite some time.
I'm tired of reading about the awesome future that could happen, but doesn't. If you think this future can happen, go and make it. Surely it's just a few Claude prompts away? Or surely you already live in this time you describe, so it's not the future, but the present?
An operating system is software which provides useful things for interfacing arbitrary software with hardware. For example:
- Providing a memory allocator
- Providing threads which manage how the CPU cores are used
- Interacting with network hardware, the motherboard's RTC, memory address mapping etc
- Scheduling arbitrary software to run simultaneously
- Providing a file system
- etc
> Why do we have modern operating systems? It’s not simply to “provide access to hardware resources”; plenty of embedded systems do that with runtimes that have no business calling themselves an “OS”. No, the core purpose of a modern operating system is to partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate.
This gets at the core of it; i.e. you don't need anything in that list above to run software, but it's useful when you want third party software to run on the hardware, and multiple pieces of software co-existing with each other, and running without special hardware knowledge.
So, to this point, I agree with the article/author on this distinction. I think differences arise from how different people use computers, and perhaps I quibble with the title more than the contents. There is many software I run and write which I imagine will continue relatively unchanged (or changed incrementally) for decades. Broadly, GUI creative software, media consumption etc. CAD, EDA, structural biology/bioinformatics software, games, media consumption (video, text etc), IDEs. I suppose another highlight is that I never personally understood the appeal of terminal-based software that many software programmers love. (Not just software programmers: bioinformaticians love CLI-based workflows too, i.e. piping stdin/out around)
I would love Android/iPhone competition! Although I imagine the same obstacle of "How do I get my societal-connections functionality to work in a way where I'm not excluded" will continue to be a problem in the short term, at least. (Banking, communications, NFC payments etc)
In recent times, I've palpably felt the excitement of being able to imagine like I was a kid again. BUT here's the reality I've simultaneously been hit with:
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?
> Is there a meeting happening anywhere right this minute that I’m supposed to be in?
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.
He talks about applications he generated without specifying what they are or do. Does he really believe everybody is going to generate their own text editor, paint program, file explorer or graphical windowing environment with A.I. just because they can?
I believe the author is misguided about A.I.'s capabilities just like many analysts and investors are.
A.I. (or should I say LLMs) is useful for specific problems but contrary to its name it has no "intelligence."
He's talked about this before. I don't remember exactly what those apps were, but they sounded like reasonable tools one would want. Thomas is a competent guy, but I think he's vastly overestimating the agency and competence of normal people. They don't have a product-oriented mindset; they might get annoyed by a bug or slow loading times, but they're not good at coming up with features or entire apps that they would want to use. Even if there are people who can do this, they don't want to spend their weekend thinking about a detailed spec for an app they want. They really just want to consume.
People could already vibe-code simple products today, but there's hardly any non-programmers that do. This is even true for businesses. For the last year people have been boasting about canceling their SaaS products, but nothing seems to have changed. SaaS stocks got hit by the ai hysteria in January, but many are back to previous levels and some even higher. There's an Indiehacker on Twitter whose product is a simple stage timer. It's not a hardware product. It's literally just the software for a stage timer. One would expect his business to have died already, but he's apparently doing completely fine.
While reading your post, I kept thinking of K&R, and the beards of the 70s. Isn't this a return to early Unix? Users writing their own small tools in C, the system shipping building blocks... walls between users rather than programs?
I would say the OS is even more necessary for two major areas:
* improved authorization, transparency and control. Presently OS's have privileged and unprivileged modes . AI has too many privileges in unprivileged modes (all credentials, all files). better control over delegating authority is needed.
* improved interface consistency. UIs still inform people on the capabilities and intentions of the machine. A blank text box with an agent is not informative. How many people have the agency to turn the blank box into a creation. A UI illustrates the toolbox available to people and the machines broader capabilities
I look forward to following your and Kurt's new adventure. I love Fly in no small part to your writing for its blog. Wild to see what feels like a complete changing of the guard at Fly, at least from the outside. Your post resonates; reminiscent of the Ink&Switch talk from local first conf that I watched today.
They don't really have to fight, most people these days accept their role as a guest on their hand-held computer.
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".
The OS is the distilled wisdom of other experts. Wisdom that neither I, nor the current generation of next-word-guessers, could possibly keep pace with; no matter how many reddit bots the frontier lab operates in its attempt to extract complex concepts into simpler vectors. It will be the collection of things that are so unbelievably expensive to reinvent and re-learn for each machine and user, that they are not subject to to the market forces that come with making the slop cheaper. Any well-maintained OS will maintain that role. And be ever more important in the future, as apps diverge into even lower quality and even less shared benefit from improving them (for the other approx. 2 users).
The OS is a giant collection of legacy compatibility shims which many people agree isn’t how you would design things if you were starting from a clean sheet of paper today.
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.
So the product is a phone without the bits that allow you to run apps on the basis that AI will implement the stuff the apps would have done? I'm not sure that'd work well with consumers buying the thing?
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?
However, if the slew of AI wearable or "companion" devices coming out are any indication -- from the failed Humane Pin, to Meta's keychain and glasses, to Microsoft's office badge (which OMG is so on-point in its enterpriseyness) to whatever Jonny Ive is cooking up at OpenAI -- the smartphone form factor may not be the eventual one we settle on for AI. Something to keep in mind when designing the OS.
I love the idea that normal people building software to solve real problems in their life is, necessarily, a toy; the only real software is blessed by our sacred priesthood of PLT experts.
> Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys
*"Forget the map, just tell me if I should get off the Eisenhower Expressway and take Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake back home?"
I'm driving some place new, but of course, I first have to go through all my neighborhood streets to the freeway, and then later, eventually, something unfamiliar. I call up Google maps and it calls out all the play by play turns and such, starting from my house, instead of just saying get on the I5 North for 70 miles, then shuts up until I am close to the unfamiliar exit. It's why I mute it, I hate the blow by blow through familiar territory. Google knows where I go, God damn them, why don't they use that information already?
There won't be an OS anymore. All you need will be a network enabled graphics driver (Hello X11) for the AI to connect to and draw on.
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.
I agree with the first part of the thesis (AI means unlimited custom software for power users who are able to describe exactly what they want) and strongly disagree with the second part (this means we don’t need any of the technology we’ve developed for software development, or distribution, resource management, etc.)
I think people will still buy templated software - applications that come with source your AI modifies or plugins your AI writes. Most people need Excel, not a badly written clone, but they may want a bunch of custom plugins that can deeply modify the UI for their use case.
Oh, ok. I guess computer science is finished, then. I should have known. It's not like there's any evidence that it's been blown wide open recently.
(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.)
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.
I think operating systems have changed. They don't interact directly with hardware much anymore, and the hardware is filled with SoCs all running systems of their own, sometimes with entire network stacks, communicating with devices and each other, collecting and processing data, often totally invisible to the operating system the user gets to work with. The operating systems most people use have gone from giving users control over their computer to being a sandboxed interface to manage files and some of what their computer is doing.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "don't interact with hardware much anymore"? If you compare modern drivers with similar ones from 20 years ago, for example, you'll find the modern ones tend to be quite a bit more complex.
There could be some interesting actual OS design innovations for new permissions, access control, and sandboxing systems that are designed from the ground up for these "conjurable" experiences (or even OS components themself).
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.
> I conjured for myself, with English as my programming language.
What I did on my computer, any power user can do on theirs.
Will do on theirs.
It’s fucking inevitable.
That’s a statement about the reality; a “prediction”, if you want a concession to your skepticism about AI, but only in the sense that I can predict that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow
Really reads like an inner dialogue or when someone wants to sell me something.
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.
Interesting times! What a time to be alive! This is the device I have always wanted! Founders are living in the future! This is Star Trek level! Drop whatever you are doing right now and join this movement!
Is this how the internet finally dies? Not with a bang but with the whimper of thousands of AI slop apps scrapping websites into oblivion?
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.
Ironically this may finally force the fulfillment of the Web 2.0 paid API service dream. Remember when people were pushing companies that just provided a paid API?
There might very well be more of that. In a world where everyone has agents filtering data on their behalf, it seems more complicated to figure out a way to force a user to view certain content along with their desired data than to simply refuse to supply data until a small transaction completes.
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.
So we go from the days when we have to pay our ISP so that we could go to weather.com to see it if it's raining outside, to a future where we have to pay for our ISP, so that we can connect to the AI company who we also have to pay, so that we can have their AI connect to the API at weather.com which we also have to pay for, so that we can see if it's raining outside? I'm not convinced that'd be making our lives better through technological progress.
The more AI is wideapread and is used by power users to build apps, the more devices will be locked from running any custom ("non-certified / non-licensed") software. For your safety and security, of course.
A few lines before the reveal I thought of this a a product sold by business, then right after resuming reading again felt the old "ahh, missed the chance again" when you laid out you're already planning it...
But really, a platform that allows one to do all levels off apps in this way where one can cleanly reset their side effects and effect on the system, and the app is exposed just as an icon, not a folder of source files, could already be possible and could lower the bar of starting vibe coding to the bottom
What I did on my computer, any power user can do on theirs.
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.
I agree with the gist of how weird everything is going to get, and how we are living in a time where people haven't come close to internalizing the shift.
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.
Hardware is still constrained by compromise. If I want a screen for movies with a battery that lasts and doesn't burn my leg when it's in my pocket, I give up a physical keyboard and nice speakers and a bigass physical camera lens.
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.
> It’s not simply to “provide access to hardware resources”; plenty of embedded systems do that with runtimes that have no business calling themselves an “OS”. No, the core purpose of a modern operating system is to partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate.
First of all the initial definition is totally correct, and if your embedded function needs to call an intermediate layer to access the hardware that layer is an OS. Second of all, all those "purposes" are exactly achieved by providing _managed_ access to hardware resources.
And that is valuable in whatever world we end up living in. Sure, 10 years from now my bank app and my Hacker News browser may both be written by "my LLM" and tailored to my use cases and desires. Will I want them to share memory? I don't think so.
This reminds me of WWDC 2010 when Steve Jobs said developers using private APIs 'know exactly what they're doing'. Good luck with your project, but I think you're vastly underestimating the problem. And many OSes are already integrating user generated AI apps.
If you give an ape a slingshot he might think he can take over the entire world. But he doesn't even know what rubber bands are, or what it takes to make them.
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.
Taking it at face value, it seems to me this will also collapse and get folded into the model.
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.
> Consider: what does computing look like in a world where many (maybe most) applications have an audience of just 1-2 people? How is software distributed? What does it run on?
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.
It's the same thing as looking down your nose at people who use Excel as a database because it's not a "real" database.
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.
Hey, all. I really don't know what to do with a post like this.
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.
Personally, I'd like to hear the full pitch, and I suspect many others would too. If the ideas are interesting enough for you to dedicate the next N years of your life to, I'm probably willing to spend 10 minutes reading the blog post. Particularly from you, a known-good writer.
Sounds like "secure phone for mass vibeware." Probably containers, authentication, auto analysis, protected user data, etc. Just diff enough from apple/andr that it can't be slapped in overnight.
I’m already edging in the article’s direction on my desktop. I recognised a lot of this, and it makes a great deal of sense.
The only question is if it’ll still make sense in six months, or if an even more unreasonable approach will be the correct one. Feels like a singularity.
I really appreciate the post.
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.
You are overthinking it :) You are one of the most interesting people on HN. I am sure others think along those lines too and would love to learn more about what you are building and where the industry is going. Others can just tune it out.
Hi Thomas, I think you're being too defensive. It's ok, I look forward to your technical posts, on what you imaging this OS powered by AI to be. Will be a fun ride.
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).
Oh, I'm not worried about the haters, they're the air we all breathe; I'm just neurotic about my writing.
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We were on a call recently where I mentioned that as a fly user SDLC and declarative config was more important than ever, and so I was pushing for sprites to have OCI images.
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.
> 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.
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.
A post a few days ago turned funtional core, imperative shell into deterministic core, non-deterministic shell. And a comment [1] on that discussed turning that into "slop core, artisinal shell". Which makes a lot of sense actually despite feeling the wrong round initially. And maybe what an OS needs to do is to support that, at a higher level. What I think we will need is strong isolation - all the software might be coming from the "same place", but do we trust that place? Certainly not currently!
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784704
I think you hit a lot themes I've personally been thinking about as well and was a nice read, thanks.
Circa 2005 I was thinking about "sessile robots" and how even smartphones of the time had enough sensors to know you were putting them in your bag and then riding on the bus and acting appropriately.
The model I see is that it is like a butler instead of a home computer, like you are driving into a strange town and looking for food and you are not going to open the McDonald's app but instead your agent does a search and through a conversational recommender you get sent somewhere. It might be sitting in your pocket the whole time and you are talking to it through something like AirPods. Maybe you put on smart glasses and it can show you things.
Apple can't give you the A.I.-native phone because it is too dependent on the app economy. For a few months I've been asking "Who is working on this?" and figured it was one of those cursed ideas that Silicon Valley would be unable to fund much like the pharmaceutical-industrial complex of Cambridge was unable to fund Facebook. I was expecting it to come out of some hungry Chinese manufacturer so I'm happy to see another horse in this race.
(e.g. I love the image that Meta has developed around Muse which makes it look like it is a "butler" when it is really much more like the old Kraftwerk song where "I program my home computer")
>If you're unsatisfied with the post,
I actually think this post gets the point across better than most.
I appreciate you saying that. I have a modus operandi with posts like this when I'm really trying to get something across and persuade, where I'll saturate it with technical details, and here I'm literally handwaving, which makes me uncomfortable (on Hacker News, I mean --- I'm comfortable with it everywhere else).
And then of course it's super self-indulgent of me just to write navel-gazing stuff like this. But I'm an HN person first and an entrepreneur second, so here we are.
I am thankful people are being so nice about it though!
no idea you were working on fly !
As someone who's building its news project on it, it's both reassuring, but also not since you're leaving..
Iirc he was one of the founders :)
My 3ct:
1. When you write a comment in a discussion of an article, be upfront with being the author. It took me a while to understand that from your comment. "Author here" is a thing.
2. Your article itself doesn't have clear authorship stated. At the very bottom there is a copyright notice, but that's pretty generic and not a single person either. Just place your name at the top together with a date. Not everybody knows you or follows your blog.
3. When I read this ...
> When I was a little kid, a family friend sold us our first “computer” — scare quotes because I’m pretty sure it was a VTech Laser 200 clone, a chiclet keyboard Z80 that ran off cassette tapes and plugged into our TV.
.. I prepared to stop reading since .. how is that not a computer? After another paragraph or two which just felt like rambling, I gave up.
You get that this a post I wrote on my site, that I did not submit here, right?
I shared this experience 1:1
with 3. being the most prominent one.. I made it a little further than that "hot take" but a few more paragraphs in the thoughts expressed seemed neither novel nor to go anywhere. SaaSpocalypse but on localhost... shrugs
Reading this, my first thought is to worry about the security aspects of it. But if you're the author, I expect that you've spent a few brain cells in that direction...
This is absolute bullshit.
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.
The author, as a kid, believed computers where like a genie that could manifest anything they ask for. It seems to be a case of wishful thinking of a kid.
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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Why the hostility? The author has stated that he believes AI will alter how we think about operating systems. I don't think that's actually true, but I can see how this line of inquiry could lead to discoveries about how AI will change the line between installed software created by others and software that is "created" by users themselves. It's reasonable to suppose those discoveries in turn will result in new products. I wish him well and hope to hear more.
But I would use a self-modifying music player, editor, game, etc. It's not black and white as you are trying to paint.
As long as the software is proven correct, who cares how it achieves that?
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You're already living in it
Agreed. Read the article through and felt cringe most of the way through.
@tptacek I think my question about your post is this — right now people rely on a lot of apps written by professionals for things like mobile banking, messaging, medical providers, mobile payments, and subscription services (music, tv, etc). The interests of the app publishers aren’t aligned with total user freedom — banking app developers don’t want a totally malleable OS where there are no process separations or trust partitions. Rather, they want to rely on OS level guarantees that their code is isolated from other apps, that the binaries are signed, that the platform is somehow trusted.
I love your idea of an OS where users write their own apps as they want. But if they want to connect to third party services or use commercial software, won’t there still have to be a lot of security guarantees? I don’t just mean the depressing “browsers must implement DRM or you can’t watch streaming video.” I mean “how will medical providers trust your device enough to give you your lab results” if you are thinking of majorly changing the mobile device security model.
It’s not a hostile question, I’m genuinely curious about this design tradeoff.
Doesn't sound hostile at all. These are the real hard questions. The 2 major mobile platforms don't seem to want this to happen at all, but you can work around that by building your own platform. But the largest API vendors don't want it either, and they're much harder to work around.
My little story:
I recently replaced my $HEALTHCARE_APP with the PWA of their website. It was the *exact* same. The app was just a webview (and a pretty good one at that!)
It makes me really question how much “security” these services need when they have websites that can do everything the app can do.
Have you seen the Googlebook? I think Google is taking the lead here with "Create a Widget". I think some have overlooked this feature or treated it as a gimmick. But this is the first step into average users building small micro apps just for themselves. I think it will go from Create a Widget to Create an App within a short period.
Banks and schools and businesses should get in the business of simply vending APIs (or MCP connections). Agents and bots are taking away the need for the endless knobs and dials of traditional software. Just expose my data securely and my agent will do what I want with it, when I need it.
"Should get", so yea, not going to happen. The most obvious should get is exactly where we are now. What you're saying is "They should be forced to" which is just what we call laws and regulations regarding digital availability. Of course this is difficult to do since they will fight back monetarily against what they would consider perverse motivation to what we are already considering perverse motivations from them.
Third party apps and commercial software will be the slowest to adapt to the new paradigm.
The fear maybe a year ago was SaaSpocalypse. Why pay for Salesforce when I can vibe a CRM to my exact needs? Turns out to not be that easy.
The lion's share of value in a product like Salesforce is the ability to say "we run Salesforce" and have everyone know what you mean and have ready answers to all your problems even if they're not perfectly tailored (or cheap). Same thing with OS really. If natural language is now the most powerful programming language then having shared vocabulary on technical topics is more valuable than ever.
> The fear maybe a year ago was SaaSpocalypse. Why pay for Salesforce when I can vibe a CRM to my exact needs? Turns out to not be that easy.
In fact, it looks like the advent of AI has actually accelerated revenue growth for SaaS rather than killed it off. People simply aren't building these custom SaaS-killers as much as commenters on HN would have us believe.
Stripe Economics, The SaaSpocalypse was more like a RenaiSaaS: https://www.stripeeconomics.com/p/the-saaspocalypse-was-more...
My lab medical results are mine and only mine. It’s for me to decide if my device is secure enough. I do not need my insurance company to decide for me what device I should use. Same with my money in the bank.
Streaming is fair. Netflix can dictate their rules. I can decide not to pay for their content.
> My lab medical results are mine and only mine.
While I agree in spirit: after a recent rib injury I wasn't allowed to take a picture of my own X-Ray using my phone or even have a copy sent to me since "that isn't the policy"... very hard to say that data was "mine" until it is "released" to me.
There is an infinitesimally small liability that some "other patient's" data might be visible on scanning device, a horde of companies assuring asses are covered and without a legal obligation to give me all "my" health data per visit I don't see an easy path to using our own devices soon, unfortunately.
Under the law now, at least in the US and EU, you do not have the legal authority to waive the obligations of your medical and financial service providers under regulatory law and court precedent.
If you want that power, you’ll need to get your national government to change the law.
> Same with my money in the bank.
I’d love for this to be the case, but we’re going to need laws to make it happen. Banks will have to be forced into it and probably also shielded from liability in case the user does something dumb.
Maybe we can force them into providing APIs for us while we’re at it so I don’t have to pay Plaid if I want to build an app to track my finances.
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I feel like most articles challenging OSes have no idea what an OS is.
Sure question what the latest tool can offer and how to integrate with it... but that's just being an app, or a window manager, or a package manager, or a distribution, that's not challenging what the OS itself is and does.
If your OS doesn't change how a computer allocates resources, then you are talking about higher level, and that can be super valuable too, arguably more valuable, but ... that's a different thing.
PS: also chroot (half a century, just checked for the fun of it), jails, containers, VMs, etc limiting how the allocation can be done do exist and have been used for decades already.
Having built software runnging on everything from microcontrollers to cloud servers to browsers, I also have no idea what an OS is.
In the context of a microcontroller, is it an RTOS? How is that different from something like Embassy with Rust, where hardware allocation and coordination is handled more at build time and less at runtime? In the context of a something showing up on a screen, is an OS something providing a UI framework and hardware abstraction - something like Win32 or Cocoa? What does that make Chrome?
In 2006 it felt like an answer to the question "what is an OS" was straightforward. In 2026, I'm rather confident that I don't have a single, simple answer. If there were ever a time to re-assess what we thought we knew about computing - now seems like a good time to do it.
Agreed. Investing in creating a whole new phone just to usher in the concepts here sounds like an expensive and slow way to do it.
As far as I am concerned an OS is really simple to define. Its the thing that manages hardware resources on a device to allow other software to run using said resources.
LLMs are not OSes and never will be, they will always need some software to first bootstrap the hardware before the software which processes the weighting can begin.
Its like we need Richard Stallman to come and argue the difference between GNU and Linux again!
>LLMs are not OSes and never will be
If we ask this a different way, is there a single self executable file when written to the sector of the disk the hardware looks for can contain the instructions for the hardware and the weights all in one?
I can't thing of any informational theory reason why this can't be the case. The only thing I can think of structuring such far more complex and less worthwhile than just having separate layers. Dealing with this biological/intelligence mess in humans is already hard enough as it is.
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> that's a different thing.
I hear what you’re saying, but we don’t have a word for that different thing. OS means the kernel. But OS also means the entire distribution - all of macOS, all of iOS, all of windows, Ubuntu, Android, etc.
Until we have a standard word for the ui “shell” that comes out of the box with the OS distribution, people - including me - are gonna call (and think of it) as the OS. Or part of the os. Or something like that.
I can't quite tell if you're being cheeky
> we don’t have a word for ... the ... distribution
> Until we have a ... word for the ... shell
distribution/distro and shell are exactly the words we have for these things
But OS sounds more impressive/important, so it's a lot more prevalent.
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i.e. most users think the OS is shell, not the kernel.
> "But it booted straight into BASIC. That’s all it did. I was, like, 8 years old. I wasn’t about to learn BASIC. What I learned instead: computers were not as awesome as I’d imagined."
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.
I think you were the exception. Most kids never even knew what BASIC was. If there was a game already on the computer, they'd be happy to play it. If they really liked the game they might learn how to start the game if it wasn't already running, but they didn't care about doing anything else. Kids who were into computers looked at a computer and saw endless possibility. Everybody else played sports outside, watched TV, or hung out with their friends.
Probably for quite a while kids were more likely to have a console than access to an actual computer. But if you had a computer it was not like you could rely on having someone else around to start up the game for you. In fact there was a good chance that your access to a computer was arranged by adults who specifically expected you to learn how to use it.
> Most kids never even knew what BASIC was
Yet magazines and books commonly published program listings for games in BASIC which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.
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It was probably a function of not just personality type but education. For whatever reason I was taught basic in elementary school as a millennial and it left an impression.
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In that area, kids with computers that booted straight to basic like the spectrum, bbc micro, c64 etc fell into two camps -- those who were interested, and those whose parents were interested. I suspect the former were more numerous, as to have a parent interested enough to spend a fortune on a computer without the pester power of the kid feels quite niche.
The vast majority of kids never touched computers, other than maybe running logo at school to move a turtle around.
Most kids who were only interested in a game had a NES or Sega console.
Of the former group, the awe began when you wrote in the example program from the manual or magazine, made it do something, and then changed it. Even something as simple as changing from 3 lives to 99.
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Why would you get a computer in that era if you didn't want to learn BASIC?
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Your priors are all out of whack. Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8. Programming is much more accessible now than then, but the overwhelming majority of people still don’t know any JavaScript or python or anything else.
Programming (by humans) is less accessible in 2026 because most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment and they don't include a user-friendly programming instruction manual (graphing calculators may be an exception however). And before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would need to write their own programs, so systems were designed to support that. Vibe programming (by LLMs) is more accessible now however.
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.
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> Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8.
I learned it at age 12. It was pretty much as the author described, except in my case the "computer" was a Texas Instruments teletype, a phone, and a 300 baud modem. Plus a booklet with reddish cover introducing the BASIC language and how to connect to our school account at Washtenaw Computing Services. That was the beginning of a life-long journey with computers.
I’d argue programming is much less accessible now. For starters “programming” means a thousand different things and where do you even start?
My Apple //e came with one language, BASIC, it was built in, nothing to buy, and came with a book on how to get started writing it.
But yeah I didn’t start at 8.
We didn’t get that Apple until I was 10, so that’s then I started.
I had Turbo C as a young teenager, but really learned C at the csh prompt of a terminal connected to a giant DG/UX computer in my first summer job.
I actually still don't know BASIC.
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> You were the exception.
I was really surprised by the article, I assumed it was going to be the same as my experience which was amazement at having the ability to write instructions that caused the system to do stuff, like make dumb games initially in basic and then better games in assembly.
I think you’re half right. To echo the other comments, I think 8 is too young for most kids to get into BASIC. I learnt programming on BASIC but I was 12 or so and had a teacher and hence structured guidance. I don’t know that I had the mental capacity to self-teach that kind of programming even at 12, let alone 8!
But 8 is not too early to learn programming as such, because my kids started around that age. Only they started creating dumb games using Scratch in a modern browser on a full-fledged modern OS. The environment you start with probably matters a lot for how much you take to it.
You were the exception too. A PC was one of the most expensive items in my house when we bought it. The computer table it sat on was the second most. I was so afraid of doing anything on it that'd break it. Heck I freaked out one time when I shut it down from the power button directly.
My Acorn BBC Model B booted straight into BBC BASIC as well, and I too thought it was awesome and taught myself BASIC straight away, and then 6502 assembler and latterly BCPL and so on. I was even younger than OP.
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'm not even that old, but totally agree with this sentiment. Going to miss those times. It's amazing being able to build whatever you want now, but it's bittersweet because if you truly wanted to learn how to do it, you could do it yourself.
I don't understand this. Back in the early days of the internet, you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books or knowing someone. Now though? You can learn all of it, and find the resources almost instantly. Want to build a computer, self host, program, you have millions of resources at your hand.
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I remember getting magazines with basic games, where the full syntax was printed out. I would type it in and save to floppies on my Apple 2e - which my mother purchased second hand.
I ended up a systems programmer in this doomed industry. BASIC on a Z80 didn't get me there (exploits on a DG/UX at a library system did.) Different people, different vectors.
I refuse the accusation - I had a very good idea what BASIC was even at 5 years old. QBASIC was the program that allowed you to open GORILLA.BAS and play the Gorilla fruit throwing game.
..at that time I have to admit, most of what I saw there went over my head. I understood the concept of program code, but had very little idea of what was going on, but wanted to learn. Eventually I started modifying the code, and started making my own stuff, driven mostly by determination rather than any understanding of what was going on.
Reading through all the comments, I think there’s also a bit of a generational gap here.
There’s a huge difference between a kid turning on a Commodore 64 or an Apple II and being dropped into the relatively no-frills versions the BASIC interpreter versus a kid in the early ’90s who had a DOS machine with MS-DOS 5 bundled with QBasic which IMHO is a more representative example of a “batteries included” BASIC environment that was significantly more user-friendly.
I also encountered QBASIC as an elementary school kid - it felt like the closest thing to sorcery. People who grew up in the age of the internet really underestimate how awesome it was to be able to just be able to place the cursor on a more obscure command (like PEEK/POKE or POINT) and see something like this:
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That was my origin story. I was 8. Tandy CoCo2. I didn’t have a cassette so I had to type all the programs from the books. Again and again.
I hope this makes you feel better: all industries are doomed. But few rise and fall in one lifetime.
Same here but with the first CoCo, TRS-80.
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fond memories modifying the variable for velocity in GORILLA.BAS before I really knew what velocity was :)
I don't remember there being any filesystem at all, let alone FAT.
Yes! Paraphrasing my childhood:
“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.”
This was me too, but objectively speaking we were in the minority. Most kids did not learn BASIC.
Nice attempt at slipping one past, but the industry is far from doomed. Where do you work now that you believe that?
Holdouts feel everything is doomed.
Adopters feel the future is brighter than ever.
Article author is excited. I am too.
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Yes! I loved BASIC! It was what got me hooked on computers.
lucky people, as soon as I learn how something works it's pretty much impossible for me to keep any interest in it
> lucky people, as soon as I learn how something works it's pretty much impossible for me to keep any interest in it
I guess that means you are still interested in pretty much everything
Naw, you had the knack.
"doomed industry?"
Please.
[dead]
I don't know what's wrong with my perspective. I cannot relate to this at all.
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.
> 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.
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.
Let me add my voice to that. It's strange to me that people are now talking about LLM integration in daily-driving their computer as if it would be something desirable. As if being able to "write one's own programs" directly wouldn't be enough; as if the focus shouldn't be on just making that as easy as possible, so that you can just type out what you want instead of expecting a nondeterministic system to infer your meaning. And that's before considering the security risks.
It feels to me rather analogous to being in a foreign country and, rather than learning the local language, you get to hire this translator that works for absurdly cheap, but you have no real idea of the accuracy (because you didn't learn!) and for some reason the translator is only able to speak while physically holding your wallet.
Oddly enough, from what I can tell, AI-powered translation services are not capturing a lot of imagination, while interest in AI-powered (human) language tutoring is booming (at least on the supply side).
> you should be able to write the scripts and programs by yourself if you want to do it that way
Having chat gpt one write me a powershell script took a 3 hour manual task using software and made it a 10 minute task which I can repeat any time I fancy should I need to.
Writing something similar would've taken me an hour+ just to dig out the key pieces of information I needed to start in a language I am proficient in. Why would I waste my time?
> don't know what's wrong with my perspective
Nothing. Thomas, as most ambitious start up founders do according to PG, is living in the future.
https://www.paulgraham.com/early.html
In my opinion, this post misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete. But it's not the idea of the OS that's outdated - it's the idea of apps. Why would you ever want to ask an AI to make an app for you to complete some task, if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly? The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.
I've seen a few posts of the form "why would you ever want to use anything else than AI from now on?" by now. My counterpoints would be:
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.
Those are all techbical limitations that will be solved with time. In 5 years I would be surprised if we do NOT have an AI as smart as today's frontier models, that runs completely locally, and has a real time voice interface.
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.
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Empirically, nobody has a problem with their stuff running on someone else's computer, with chat interfaces, or with repetition, or with repetition.
Loss of control/privacy, poor performance at high cost, bad UX.
Fortunately our industry has been getting people used to these for years.
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We are talking about a hypothetical future where coding AIs are good enough, cheap enough and ubiquitous enough that not just expert programmers, but everybody is capable of vibe coding exactly what they need, to the point they actually reach for coding AIs and not the app store with ready-made apps. That future is still far away, at least 5 years, probably closer to 10-15. In that hypothetical future, most of the problems you're talking about would be solved, or else we wouldn't have that future yet.
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> Unless you have a local model and the appropriate hardware for it, your agent is Somebody Else's Computer
So, any Apple computer?
> if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly?
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).
If it costs $0.10 to do the task once, then you can be sure as hell it costs orders of magnitude more than $1 to vibe code a whole damn app that does that thing, especially if you want good user experience which is the whole point of custom vibe coded apps. Whereas the App Store will have an inferior, mass-market version of what you want actually priced $1.
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What if all computer games from now on are AI Dungeon?
I imagine the future of computer interaction could evolve into a split model combining foundational capabilities that just make sense to be pre-built, tested and shared deterministic code - codecs, numerical solvers, geometry kernels, databases and transactional tools, compilers, theorem provers, cryptography, etc. - with a fluid interaction layer that accesses either local or cloud-provided versions of those foundational capabilities and is capable of synthesising any tools it needs where it would be helpful to build it first - either as a one-off or something to cache - for anything that can’t just be done as a task.
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.
An AI assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. An application written by an AI assistant, if it doesn't just call an LLM at runtime, will mostly likely produce the same answer for the same inputs. That is, unless there's something intrinsic to its business logic that makes it nondeterministic.
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
And when applicable, the program would be much more efficient than the LLM.
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.
A *human* assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. At some point, we'll need to stop treating computers as instruction executors and start treating them as autonomous agents. Non-determinism isn't a bug to be fixed, it's just the reality of working with this new kind of machines, and operators of those machines need to embrace that fact, like they did for human assistants.
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I want an agent studio and execution sandbox where my LLM driven assistant builds and maintains my apps with a receipt or transcript like history of what it did to create each app. Determinism built per use case with non deterministic assistance orchestrating the build and management layer. Extra credit if I can trivially share and collaborate with others per “deterministic silo” via a shared link. Something like Claude Code + AWS Lambda|(Docker|Podman) + Tangled.org with LLM code generation for my phone and workstation.
The LLMs empower for building, the determinism improves output-expectation alignment. It’s fundamentally an on device software factory, hypervisor, and storage system.
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> Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete.
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.
The cognitive dissonance is astounding in AI circles. The vast majority of people have a personal computer in their pocket and they use it the vast majority of the time to scroll Instagram, play games, and occasionally interact with their bank and other social services. People who have laptops and desktop computers have them for specialized tasks they already do. None of the vast majority of users who buy their phone when the screen cracks and the battery stops working care about the agentic AI world because their phone already does everything they want to do.
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Okay, I went too far with that one sentence. Can we all pretend I have instead said "this model will be obsolete for most, not all, but most productivity apps and most, not all, but most office tools"?
> Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete.
Define "soon".
Banks in the UK have thirty million customers each. They have moved away from web interfaces to apps on well-controlled platforms.
Social media doesn't use the mobile web; it's not good enough.
Neither of these applications for a phone are simply going to surrender to agentic environments on a phone that de-emphasises apps.
They both have a need to fully control that experience, and yet they are polar opposites in terms of seriousness.
We can't even stop voice assistants acting on commands they mishear from TV shows, youtube clips, radio.
“Go enjoy my family photos for me.”
“Go play video games for me”
“Go create music for me”
Idk. Seems like there is still use for apps.
This reminds me the car industry touchscreen craze: if you can paint anything and control anything via the touchscreen, then the only thing you need is the touchscreen, right?
Absolutely agree. At the start of the year when Opus 4.6 came out, I remember my co-worker showing me a bunch of apps he made for himself to make himself more productive.
Fast forward a few months, and most of those apps are abandonware. Not that he's not as productive, he just skipped the middlemen (the apps), and started directly asking the agent to do those things.
> Why would you ever want to ask an AI to make an app for you to complete some task, if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly?
Given the current trends in predictive language models, once users are able to articulate their needs with clarity and precision, conventional software development may become obsolete.
It is not clear whether models will be both capable enough and cost effective enough but not as capable to wipe us all out. The outcome is a tiny sliver of possible futures and even then likely short-lived.
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).
Exactly my opinion too.
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...
Like browsing TikTok or messaging your friends? People want their devices to work like their friends’ devices do. Your prediction seems to be out of touch with how and why people actually use computing devices. Nobody actually uses them to "perform tasks".
Maybe we need an app store just for agents to make purchases. Imagine a world where startups have their valuations determined by how many agents are using their apps. Those startups... Also operated by agents. We don't even need users anymore!!!
Why would you ever want a nice word processor to write a letter to someone when you could just ask AI to write the letter? Why would you ever want photo editing software when you could just tell the AI to make your picture look good? Why would you want audio recording and mixing software when you could just tell the AI to output the next Billboard 100 hit? Why would you want a camera when you could just ask AI to generate photos for you?
This is the part that many people are missing. Decades ago I heard "the ideal UI is a search box," and I agree today even more.
I don't understand why people are still thinking that clicking on stuff will still be a desirable thing in the future.
Inputs for the ui might be me talking, or typing, or having someone else talk or type. They might also be GPS, temperature, BLE devices nearby. Or maybe a button I smash because I don't feel like re explaining something.
What happens after an input is still the best part of a UI. We like seeing/hearing/feeling things in different ways.
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I agree - we should have many more good fully-keyboard-accessible UIs!
I don't want to talk to my computer to use it.
What you’re describing is basically a terminal. We’ve had those for a while.
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It’s funny you say this because Apple resisted an App Store for apps. They originally expected web based apps. The market demanded an App Store. Remember web snippets where one could clip a portal to view a small section of a website?
The current market very clearly demands AI assistants that can do everything. See ChatGPT app, or the new Muse app.
There is a big misconception in your answer in that you seem to believe that an LLM would always produce (machine) code that does what the user intended, in a correct and safe manner. Neither of these assumptions is true. If you knew how LLMs are built and operate, you would know they are not reliable at all. What you might ask from an AI interpreter OS might be unique and thus might be absent from its training set and might not follow a pattern inferred from its training set either.
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.
First and foremost, I'm comparing specifically just having a suite of heavily personalized vibecoded apps like in OP blog post, versus using an agent directly. I'm comparing just these two options and nothing else.
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.
Had this thought this morning after seeing DHH announcing that Basecamp isn't writing code by hand anymore and they're using AI to write Rust for Hey's backend.
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.
> The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.
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.
> We're extremely far from anyone, even those with the most interest and capability, giving a practical demo of this future you're suggesting.
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.
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> the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete
"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]
I hate that web platforms and other low level cloud infrastructure are called "apps" these days. Makes it impossible to talk about actual end user apps, vs. all the other code that's also running in addition to actual end user apps, which will remain in place even if actual end user apps become obsolete.
In other news, switching from gas guzzlers to electric cars had the unfortunate side effect of highways disappearing.
> the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.
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.
The author is missing fundamentals. Exactly what to expect from someone who thought the built is BASIC was lame.
Plebian os update incoming. It's a GPU terminal with openbox fallback. Each tile in the tiling kitty terminal interface uses its own xvfb.
Everything in the shell and you can click it. I'm building custom needle2 models to operate the panels and tabs instead of using tokens and md files
> Suddenly, everything has changed. Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8.
I've been feeling this way for months and months. If you're a person who's curious about computers and what they can do you can do for you, we just kind of talk to the computer now and ask it to do the thing. And it does it. I know most of what's happening the whole time yet it still feels like magic. We're pondering orbs all day now.
I've been a professional software person for 15+ years... my assumptions as to what the right decisions are in building software now are racked every day. And more than ever I want the device you're describing: blank slate hardware I build to do what I want how I want it to. Yes, I know that's not for everybody. But I really want to just boot up something from scratch and say, "this is how we should deal with email." Because the way I want to deal with email is the way I want to deal with email, and LLMs will help me get there. Get all this UI chrome out of my face.
Last, I've also mused (heh) about a sort of GitHub for PRDs:
> ...there’ll be thousands of times more applications that pull in 1/7th of the guts of a word processor to solve some idiosyncratic work or home life problem for somebody who doesn’t know what a for-loop is.
I think those guts-as-md-files can be maintained in on publicly available platform for all to use. Sort of a "best practices of the commons." Language-agnostic. Or rather, one language: English. Apps going forward don't necessarily need a datatable plugin — because every datatable plugin eventually has defaults or assumptions that clash with what you need — but it needs the schematics for the types of parts a datatable can have.
It's just such an interesting time to be curious about computers.
> That makes a lot of sense in a world where we’re importing all our software from strangers. It makes less sense in the world we’re heading to, where most of the software we’re carving up fiefdoms for has the same provenance.
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.
I think OP may be onto something real, while you are definitely right if we translate concepts directly. But maybe the challenge, with current platforms included, is because we try to cram identities by reference. If a phone had its own identity, with which you transact as with any party then lots of the security concerns would dissolve. To tone down crankiness, I refer to identity in the technical sense, not personality etc. This doesn’t solve the challenge but it might point to a different foundation for a security model.
If the phone injures or defrauds you, does it have to make restitution? If so, how?
'Transacting' requires not only identity but accountability, a completely controlled-by-you phone cannot meaningfully transact separately from you.
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> If a phone had its own identity, with which you transact as with any party then lots of the security concerns would dissolve.
I feel like a lot of new security concerns would be created.
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I mean, everything should eh sandboxed imo. Even OS included software.
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.
The right basic idea is, the UI for "do X to Y" must combine designating which Y you want and giving permission to access that Y (and no other). It's when the OS shell separates these aspects that you have to choose between extra annoying useless permission pop-ups and any security boundaries.
(Yes reworking our all our systems in terms of capability security is a giant job. But there's a difference between a giant job and )
Nope. There has never been a "good" post written in this genre ("I'm leaving my last team, here's my new project") and I'm not going to waste interesting bits on my pro-forma transition post.
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.
I think you got your comment replies mixed up? I don't see the relevance of this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49850998).
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From having seen what happened during the development of FirefoxOS (Boot2Gecko), from a developer point of view. My take is that the biggest hurdle are not the development of the core applications, but the approval and certifications from the various partners.
For example, some company did not like the fact that the call stack could be reverse engineered … yet they would not help you build a prototype at the pace of development (and this was back in 2011)
Then once you have a working OS, the second hurdle was to demonstrate a very high number of active users, such that they dare to even consider your new environment as a potential target. This a bootstrap challenge which is hard to achieve. To get traction from App developer implied getting traction from users, which implied having apps the users care about …
While you goal of removing the application layer sounds like a nice way to work-around the bootstrap problem, I fear you will still have it at the API level.
I wish you good luck, and I hope the landscape has changed in the last decade.
I doubt that we are entering a world where people will be using AI to write their own little apps, and that is coming from someone who does it.
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.
I think I agree for somewhat different reasons.
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.
The thing is the LLM interfaces encourage people to write their own apps.
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.
> The thing is the LLM interfaces encourage people to write their own apps.
LLMs are simply the latest incarnation of VB6 + Clippy.
I disagree. Basic etc still required effort.
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.
> I disagree. Basic etc still required effort.
I agree with BASIC taking effort, yet the baseline for effort has also changed. Over the span of my lifetime, we have gone from virtually everyone performing tasks without the aid of computers, to a few hobbyists and early adopters writing their own software, to buying software off the shelf, to using targeted online applications for free or nominal cost. At the same time people are expecting applications to be easier to use. As you suggested, constant churn in infrequently used applications can cause a lot of frustration.
Now I agree with you if the discussion is about using AI to immediately solve the problem at hand. I simply don't agree that it will end up with people creating reusable applications to perform the task. While overcoming the technical hurdles would be easy enough, I think that it takes a certain type of personality to think of creating a long term solution. Then there is describing the problem in a way that an LLM can translate into code, then there is the testing of the software generated.
You can’t
> partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate.
without
> provide access to hardware resources
That’s still definitely what an OS does. The application model is often very loosely coupled. See web browsers.
A difference between embedded systems and operating systems is the ability to provide access to hardware (in such a way as to isolate and dictate communication) _dynamically_ with a-prior unknown requests.
> Here’s what’s about to happen: users will increasingly interact with stuff they themselves conjured into being.
I find this unlikely. It's far more likely that every good idea that anyone has will just be more quickly folded into software from the big software houses.
AI doesn't slow this down, because big software houses have much more money for compute and tokens.
You have a good idea for a communication add-on? Two weeks later it's available in Teams, Slack and WhatsApp.
People aren't writing their own software, for the same reason they aren't 3D printing their own items.
I don’t think the post has a lot to offer, but I will share thoughts on how a modern operating system can add _a lot of value_ both for non-agentic users and for agents.
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.
For the record: I didn't suggest this post did have a lot to offer. I didn't submit or upvote it. I pretty conscientiously kept it simple and abstract, because (as I said in a different thread) this genre of posts ("I just left the company I'm highly associated with, to do this new thing") is deeply cursed.
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.
But so much of macOS is also uninstrumentable except via undocumented APIs that are unreliable at best. Why wouldn't Linux or even FreeBSD be even better? They're not limited to content but even the source that can be updated and rebuilt to do literally anything.
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.
Linux and the BSDs might be more instrumentable, but the rest of the experience is so fragmented in comparison. Regardless of category, there is no single service or data format that everybody has agreed to use and build on top of.
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.
> Why wouldn't Linux or even FreeBSD be even better?
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.
> Forget the map, just tell me if I should get off the Eisenhower Expressway and take Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake back home?
> 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.
Waze does not answer my commute question for me. Waze finds what it believes to be the quickest route from west loop to my house, but that route is virtually never reasonable. There's only 4 reasonable routes; I just need to know which one to take.
You're right, "tell me which of these four preconceived routes is fastest" is much nicher than "telly me the fastest route"
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> I’m aware that no matter what I write here, I’m going to sound like yet another startup nerd talking about “the future of programming” before announcing that I’ve joined, like, Sri Lanka’s answer to Uber or something.
Hah, shots fired! https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra... (Which to be fair was a prescient critique of Google too.)
> There is no better way to put it. I feel like I’ve joined a literal revolutionary war, surrounded by and fighting alongside guerilla troops, and it’s win or die.
What a load of self-aggrandizing bullshit. How do we keep minting these guys with a completely confabulated sense of perspective?
Most people don't have specialised computing / software needs or uses. In fact, they're generally Overwhelmed by the current software landscape. They want less, not more tools.
And to them software is generally a not much more than a home-screen bookmark to some client that could be a website.
And then there are products that call themselves an "OS", but which they have nothing to do with computer operating systems...
The idea of software provided by domain experts has to continue even if you can write software to do what you want by chatting to AI.
"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.
> If an entrepreneur did that with no domain expertise, imagine the potential liability.
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.
This is the reasonable stance. But both profit and convenience override reason.
If OP sees this, I really like how you are thinking about things. It's really hard to see forward. The target isn't fixed. Bell Labs, Apple, etc. were mostly solving for a fixed target. But now the target is a relationship between humans and LLMs, and the way that LLMs work has been evolving rapidly. I can think of a number of ways to conceptualize how things are moving, but they're probably all wrong. My best guesses about what needs to remain stable is that I don't think shared software is going away entirely, and I don't think all input is going to collapse to just a microphone and a camera. There is a floor on tasks that we want agents to do for us. I'd rather rename a file on my desktop or text my friend myself. Apple and Google have both tried very hard to abstract the file away from user reach, but it's such a convenient unit of sharing, that it might stick around for a while.
In some way, a "file" dates back thousands of years when ancient civilizations wrote ownership and debt and whatnot on clay slates. Then hundreds of years of paper records. It’ll probably stick around for quite some time.
I'm tired of reading about the awesome future that could happen, but doesn't. If you think this future can happen, go and make it. Surely it's just a few Claude prompts away? Or surely you already live in this time you describe, so it's not the future, but the present?
An operating system is software which provides useful things for interfacing arbitrary software with hardware. For example:
> Why do we have modern operating systems? It’s not simply to “provide access to hardware resources”; plenty of embedded systems do that with runtimes that have no business calling themselves an “OS”. No, the core purpose of a modern operating system is to partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate.
This gets at the core of it; i.e. you don't need anything in that list above to run software, but it's useful when you want third party software to run on the hardware, and multiple pieces of software co-existing with each other, and running without special hardware knowledge.
So, to this point, I agree with the article/author on this distinction. I think differences arise from how different people use computers, and perhaps I quibble with the title more than the contents. There is many software I run and write which I imagine will continue relatively unchanged (or changed incrementally) for decades. Broadly, GUI creative software, media consumption etc. CAD, EDA, structural biology/bioinformatics software, games, media consumption (video, text etc), IDEs. I suppose another highlight is that I never personally understood the appeal of terminal-based software that many software programmers love. (Not just software programmers: bioinformaticians love CLI-based workflows too, i.e. piping stdin/out around)
I would love Android/iPhone competition! Although I imagine the same obstacle of "How do I get my societal-connections functionality to work in a way where I'm not excluded" will continue to be a problem in the short term, at least. (Banking, communications, NFC payments etc)
In recent times, I've palpably felt the excitement of being able to imagine like I was a kid again. BUT here's the reality I've simultaneously been hit with:
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?
> Is there a meeting happening anywhere right this minute that I’m supposed to be in?
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.
He talks about applications he generated without specifying what they are or do. Does he really believe everybody is going to generate their own text editor, paint program, file explorer or graphical windowing environment with A.I. just because they can?
I believe the author is misguided about A.I.'s capabilities just like many analysts and investors are.
A.I. (or should I say LLMs) is useful for specific problems but contrary to its name it has no "intelligence."
He's talked about this before. I don't remember exactly what those apps were, but they sounded like reasonable tools one would want. Thomas is a competent guy, but I think he's vastly overestimating the agency and competence of normal people. They don't have a product-oriented mindset; they might get annoyed by a bug or slow loading times, but they're not good at coming up with features or entire apps that they would want to use. Even if there are people who can do this, they don't want to spend their weekend thinking about a detailed spec for an app they want. They really just want to consume.
People could already vibe-code simple products today, but there's hardly any non-programmers that do. This is even true for businesses. For the last year people have been boasting about canceling their SaaS products, but nothing seems to have changed. SaaS stocks got hit by the ai hysteria in January, but many are back to previous levels and some even higher. There's an Indiehacker on Twitter whose product is a simple stage timer. It's not a hardware product. It's literally just the software for a stage timer. One would expect his business to have died already, but he's apparently doing completely fine.
Out of curiosity, what definition of "intelligence" are you using when you say that an LLM doesn't have it?
True reasoning capabilities and continuous learning.
And self-awareness for bonus points.
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While reading your post, I kept thinking of K&R, and the beards of the 70s. Isn't this a return to early Unix? Users writing their own small tools in C, the system shipping building blocks... walls between users rather than programs?
Collecting fantasies from the Joe Rogan show in order to get funding:
https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/1082001/te...
So, what are you really working on?
I would say the OS is even more necessary for two major areas:
* improved authorization, transparency and control. Presently OS's have privileged and unprivileged modes . AI has too many privileges in unprivileged modes (all credentials, all files). better control over delegating authority is needed.
* improved interface consistency. UIs still inform people on the capabilities and intentions of the machine. A blank text box with an agent is not informative. How many people have the agency to turn the blank box into a creation. A UI illustrates the toolbox available to people and the machines broader capabilities
I look forward to following your and Kurt's new adventure. I love Fly in no small part to your writing for its blog. Wild to see what feels like a complete changing of the guard at Fly, at least from the outside. Your post resonates; reminiscent of the Ink&Switch talk from local first conf that I watched today.
My colleague Steve Sanderson showed off VibeOS already back in June https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfyZhV1dKM
Sounds like this is a more serious and phone-centered take on what Steve demoed. We sure live in interesting times.
Big tech will fight tooth and nail to prevent users from becoming power users.
They don't really have to fight, most people these days accept their role as a guest on their hand-held computer.
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".
That's the bet.
The OS is the distilled wisdom of other experts. Wisdom that neither I, nor the current generation of next-word-guessers, could possibly keep pace with; no matter how many reddit bots the frontier lab operates in its attempt to extract complex concepts into simpler vectors. It will be the collection of things that are so unbelievably expensive to reinvent and re-learn for each machine and user, that they are not subject to to the market forces that come with making the slop cheaper. Any well-maintained OS will maintain that role. And be ever more important in the future, as apps diverge into even lower quality and even less shared benefit from improving them (for the other approx. 2 users).
The OS is a giant collection of legacy compatibility shims which many people agree isn’t how you would design things if you were starting from a clean sheet of paper today.
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.
After reading the last two paragraphs of this article, I have to think that the person who wrote it never saw a non-x86 computer.
So the product is a phone without the bits that allow you to run apps on the basis that AI will implement the stuff the apps would have done? I'm not sure that'd work well with consumers buying the thing?
Why does this article have this title? I could see nothing in it at all that relates to the question posed by the title.
> Why does this article have this title?
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?
Sure, but then think about OSes ... not just "software".
This is probably what Naval Ravikant means when he says "Apple is dead" so you're in good company -- https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/12/googles-create-my-widget-f...
However, if the slew of AI wearable or "companion" devices coming out are any indication -- from the failed Humane Pin, to Meta's keychain and glasses, to Microsoft's office badge (which OMG is so on-point in its enterpriseyness) to whatever Jonny Ive is cooking up at OpenAI -- the smartphone form factor may not be the eventual one we settle on for AI. Something to keep in mind when designing the OS.
An OS is what launches the web browser. Duh.
Adult Roblox
I love the idea that normal people building software to solve real problems in their life is, necessarily, a toy; the only real software is blessed by our sacred priesthood of PLT experts.
> Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys
https://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html
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Didn’t mean any judgement just the metaphor that came to mind
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
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> the only real software is blessed by our sacred priesthood of PLT experts.
Incredible how anti-intellectualism keeps taking over the software engineering profession.
LMAO that's horrifying.
*"Forget the map, just tell me if I should get off the Eisenhower Expressway and take Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake back home?"
I'm driving some place new, but of course, I first have to go through all my neighborhood streets to the freeway, and then later, eventually, something unfamiliar. I call up Google maps and it calls out all the play by play turns and such, starting from my house, instead of just saying get on the I5 North for 70 miles, then shuts up until I am close to the unfamiliar exit. It's why I mute it, I hate the blow by blow through familiar territory. Google knows where I go, God damn them, why don't they use that information already?
There won't be an OS anymore. All you need will be a network enabled graphics driver (Hello X11) for the AI to connect to and draw on.
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.
It's going to come full circle and the model's output layer is going to be the grid of pixels. Nvidia will have returned home.
Surely it's simply software that has its own kernel, that could be booted to from BIOS/uEFI or any other low level hardware initialisation process.
I agree with the first part of the thesis (AI means unlimited custom software for power users who are able to describe exactly what they want) and strongly disagree with the second part (this means we don’t need any of the technology we’ve developed for software development, or distribution, resource management, etc.)
I didn't say we don't need operating systems anymore. That's not what I believe.
I think people will still buy templated software - applications that come with source your AI modifies or plugins your AI writes. Most people need Excel, not a badly written clone, but they may want a bunch of custom plugins that can deeply modify the UI for their use case.
What it has always been. Nothing has changed in this regard.
Oh, ok. I guess computer science is finished, then. I should have known. It's not like there's any evidence that it's been blown wide open recently.
(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.)
Are you reducing computer science to… just OSs?
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.
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I think operating systems have changed. They don't interact directly with hardware much anymore, and the hardware is filled with SoCs all running systems of their own, sometimes with entire network stacks, communicating with devices and each other, collecting and processing data, often totally invisible to the operating system the user gets to work with. The operating systems most people use have gone from giving users control over their computer to being a sandboxed interface to manage files and some of what their computer is doing.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "don't interact with hardware much anymore"? If you compare modern drivers with similar ones from 20 years ago, for example, you'll find the modern ones tend to be quite a bit more complex.
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I've heard very competent people claiming similar things. I think there's an abstraction I'm missing. I know they don't mean it literally.
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
I mean it literally.
This is by and for people who do not distinguish between the UI and the OS, like how "MSIE" is "The Internet" for them.
There could be some interesting actual OS design innovations for new permissions, access control, and sandboxing systems that are designed from the ground up for these "conjurable" experiences (or even OS components themself).
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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A new phone? How trite.
> I conjured for myself, with English as my programming language. What I did on my computer, any power user can do on theirs. Will do on theirs. It’s fucking inevitable. That’s a statement about the reality; a “prediction”, if you want a concession to your skepticism about AI, but only in the sense that I can predict that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow
Really reads like an inner dialogue or when someone wants to sell me something.
> What even is an OS now?
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.
The same as it has always been, per Computer Science definitions.
Interesting times! What a time to be alive! This is the device I have always wanted! Founders are living in the future! This is Star Trek level! Drop whatever you are doing right now and join this movement!
Is this how the internet finally dies? Not with a bang but with the whimper of thousands of AI slop apps scrapping websites into oblivion?
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.
Ironically this may finally force the fulfillment of the Web 2.0 paid API service dream. Remember when people were pushing companies that just provided a paid API?
There might very well be more of that. In a world where everyone has agents filtering data on their behalf, it seems more complicated to figure out a way to force a user to view certain content along with their desired data than to simply refuse to supply data until a small transaction completes.
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.
So we go from the days when we have to pay our ISP so that we could go to weather.com to see it if it's raining outside, to a future where we have to pay for our ISP, so that we can connect to the AI company who we also have to pay, so that we can have their AI connect to the API at weather.com which we also have to pay for, so that we can see if it's raining outside? I'm not convinced that'd be making our lives better through technological progress.
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> Is this how the internet finally dies?
Like many major cultural phenomenon, expect a pendulum effect, more than a beginning or end of a trend.
this sound like omarchy mobile
The more AI is wideapread and is used by power users to build apps, the more devices will be locked from running any custom ("non-certified / non-licensed") software. For your safety and security, of course.
A few lines before the reveal I thought of this a a product sold by business, then right after resuming reading again felt the old "ahh, missed the chance again" when you laid out you're already planning it...
But really, a platform that allows one to do all levels off apps in this way where one can cleanly reset their side effects and effect on the system, and the app is exposed just as an icon, not a folder of source files, could already be possible and could lower the bar of starting vibe coding to the bottom
Your post basically is Alexa.
>What I did on my computer, any power user can do on theirs. Will do on theirs. It’s fucking inevitable.
Hubris detected.
In all seriousness though, I'm not so sure.
Power users are lazy users.
And we're not all serial entrepreneurs with 400k karma points on HN, remember.
What I did on my computer, any power user can do on theirs.
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.
I agree with the gist of how weird everything is going to get, and how we are living in a time where people haven't come close to internalizing the shift.
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.
Hardware is still constrained by compromise. If I want a screen for movies with a battery that lasts and doesn't burn my leg when it's in my pocket, I give up a physical keyboard and nice speakers and a bigass physical camera lens.
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.
> It’s not simply to “provide access to hardware resources”; plenty of embedded systems do that with runtimes that have no business calling themselves an “OS”. No, the core purpose of a modern operating system is to partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate.
First of all the initial definition is totally correct, and if your embedded function needs to call an intermediate layer to access the hardware that layer is an OS. Second of all, all those "purposes" are exactly achieved by providing _managed_ access to hardware resources.
And that is valuable in whatever world we end up living in. Sure, 10 years from now my bank app and my Hacker News browser may both be written by "my LLM" and tailored to my use cases and desires. Will I want them to share memory? I don't think so.
This reminds me of WWDC 2010 when Steve Jobs said developers using private APIs 'know exactly what they're doing'. Good luck with your project, but I think you're vastly underestimating the problem. And many OSes are already integrating user generated AI apps.
Not really related except the title: Its time for operating systems to rediscover hardware - USENIX 21: https://youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo
If you give an ape a slingshot he might think he can take over the entire world. But he doesn't even know what rubber bands are, or what it takes to make them.
I kind of agree with the premises of the author.
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.
A solution in search of a problem already solved that no longer exists.
This seems to be only thought out after a day of vibe coding apps that no-one uses.
Taking it at face value, it seems to me this will also collapse and get folded into the model.
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.
A bunch of dot files, obviously.
> Consider: what does computing look like in a world where many (maybe most) applications have an audience of just 1-2 people? How is software distributed? What does it run on?
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.
Have you thought carefully about this? What does it mean to call a piece of software that solves a real problem you have in your life "slop"?
It's the same thing as looking down your nose at people who use Excel as a database because it's not a "real" database.
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.
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Kernel + Shell + Slop
Don't forget systemd :-\
he did mention slop
So - yet another way to turn a computer into a subscription service (to pay for the AI providers). No, thanks.
>yet another startup nerd talking about “the future of programming” before announcing that I’ve joined, like, Sri Lanka’s answer to Uber or something.
not just startup nerd, he also make gas town and drunken rant
steve yegge is not tptacek (thanks for cryptopals, tptacek!)
You've misunderstood; the quoted line from the post is most likely subtweeting Steve Yegge (in particular https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra...).
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