alt Hacker NewsThe 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.