> "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.
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.
> 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.
I think that starting with BASIC and/or some other programming language (such as Forth) is useful, and is better than some modern systems that don't expect you to enter your own programs immediately. I think that AI and LLM should not be needed (although it could be installed as another program like any other one can be). It should be possible to use programs with each other (and to stop them from doing so and/or add proxies in between if the user wants to program it to do this). My ideas involves Command, Automation, and Query Language; it would be possible to use this with zero or more other programs to answer the questions such as "should I get off the Eisenhower Expressway and take Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake back home" and "is there a meeting happening anywhere right this minute that I’m supposed to be in", although some programs might already be able to do these things with the existing menus so that you do not need to add your own, but you can make your own scripts if that is helpful, too. (If you want to use a LLM, then you can install a LLM and ask the LLM to write the script, but this should not be required nor should it be the default, and there are also many reasons for the use of the LLM to be discouraged.)
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
If the code works good enough, it works good enough. If good enough is insufficient for success criteria, you’ll have to trade app evolution velocity and flexibility for more determinism via more human effort (“artisanal hand crafted”), evaluated on a per use case basis. “Does this software have to be good? How good? Have I hit diminishing returns yet?”
Pros and cons to code being cheap to generate now, it’s always about tradeoffs. I don’t want to build cars, I want to drive cars.
> 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.
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!!!
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.
> 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]
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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 pay for our ISP, so that we can connect to the AI company that we also have to we pay for, so that we can have the 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? Would that be making our lives better through technological progress?
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).
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.
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?
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 some of what their computer is doing.
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.
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 do think there's some interesting space to be explored in capability-based systems, but even then I think it would mostly end up looking similar to how existing systems are, just with one more element added
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
20 goto 10
“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.”
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
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.
The LLMs empower for building, the determinism improves output-expectation alignment. It’s fundamentally an on device software factory, hypervisor, and storage system.
Remember when everyone was talking about treating computers as cattle rather than pets?
This seems like a weird inversion. Programs as pets instead of cattle. Toxoplasmosis, ahoy...
Pros and cons to code being cheap to generate now, it’s always about tradeoffs. I don’t want to build cars, I want to drive cars.
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.
I don't understand why people are still thinking that clicking on stuff will still be a desirable thing in the future.
What happens after an input is still the best part of a UI. We like seeing/hearing/feeling things in different ways.
"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]
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.
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.
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.
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 feel like a lot of new security concerns would be created.
'Transacting' requires not only identity but accountability, a completely controlled-by-you phone cannot meaningfully transact separately from you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
(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.
The most recent was Loris Degioanni and before that was Brendan Gregg.
But feel free to dismiss me as a moron because I'm trying to be intellectually curious about the world
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
not just startup nerd, he also make gas town and drunken rant
1. spyware launcher
2. adware launcher
3. sales-funnel/app-store launcher
4. web-browser and game-engine launcher
5. content-production and accounting applications
6. nerd stuff that 5 other people care about...
I could be wrong, but have yet to see evidence to the contrary with users. =3
https://youtu.be/q225u-qGpas?si=9QH6gw4gOUxnAKZy&t=9