What even is an OS now?

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.

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.

@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.

> "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 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.)

> 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.

And then there are products that call themselves an "OS", but which they have nothing to do with computer operating systems...

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."

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?

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?

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

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)

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.

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 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.

Big tech will fight tooth and nail to prevent users from becoming power users.

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).

Why does this article have this title? I could see nothing in it at all that relates to the question posed by the title.

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?

An OS is what launches the web browser. Duh.

Adult Roblox

This is probably what Naval Ravikant means when he says "Apple is dead" so you're in good company -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47956505

If this VUI (Vibed User Interface) future comes about it entirely dismantles Apple's (and Android's) App Store moat. From a cynical perspective this may be why Apple may be shifting their strategy to enshittification: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/06/phil-schillers-app-store-e...

Google has seen the future, and like their strategy with search (but unlike Apple, which continues blocking and suing "everything" app makers) are willing to disrupt themselves: 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.

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.

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.)

*"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?

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 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.

> 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.

A new phone? How trite.

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 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.

The same as it has always been, per Computer Science definitions.

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.