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.
The historical baggage is so heavy I don't think anyone can realistically throw it away, so what we'll end up getting are almost certainly incremental improvements to existing foundations.
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 computers are filled with SoCs all running systems of their own, sometimes with entire network stacks, communicating with devices and each other, collecting and processing data and that activity can be totally invisible to the operating system the user gets to work with.
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.
No directly anyway, for the OS it's all abstractions and isolation. There was a time when the OS could basically see and control everything, but now there are subsystems all over the place with their own memory, their own software, all outside of the control of the OS. CSME runs while the computer is powered off.
> 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.
Ownership does not imply co-identity. If my phone harms someone else, without me being responsible but e.g. the brand that updated its firmware? Your questions are good, and I don’t have the answers. I just think our current model doesn’t either.
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 )
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
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete.
I very much 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 if 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 either 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, and how. 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 systems right now. Not because it couldn't make their time working the computer better, but because they can't be bothered.
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.
I think the rise of Claw's, Grok Bot and Muse is a good counterpoint to this. Yes they are still niche specialized interfaces right now, but they are basically allowing non-technical people to do things that have been easily possible with scripts and cronjobs for a long time. Its basically the Ford and faster houses analogy.
When I look around me, the only time people get their phone out of their pockets is either for youtube, some social media, or calling/chatting with people. It's very rare to even see them set reminders or use the calculator. It's look like you're in some tech bubble. People outside of that don't scripts or do repetitive and formalized stuff. The people that do create apps and services to sell.
My wife is as non-technical as it gets, but she still spends hours with ChatGPT everyday. Calorie counting, parenting tips, gardening help, fact checks, looking up celebrities, road trip planning, meal planning, health related questions, all with ChatGPT. I really don't think she's the only one. It wasn't the most downloaded iPhone app of 2025 for nothing.
This is a bizarre sentence seeing as Google is a portal for most people. So replacing Google with ChatGPT is replacing all those destination sites as well.
The use cases described above aren't really multiple applications though. They're just using a search method to get the right fact or factoid. Most of those websites have been complements for Google Search rather than standalone services whether they like it or not. If chat bots replace Google Search, they'll replace the entire ecosystem.
Oh, and she also uses image generation to test redecoration ideas by asking "gipitiak" to add/remove/recolor things on room photos. That's something you can't do with Google search in any way, shape or form.
Not that this matters, because Google search alone disproves the claim that people only use phones for videos and social media.
I didn't intend to argue either way, but I feel that adding "and search" to the argument made above doesn't really weaken it. The full claim is that regular users weren't really interested in using power-user apps, so they won't be interested with a chat-bot UI either.
I do personally think that we'll see regular users interested in new, different workflows than the automation ones we associate with power users, and the image generation use case you mention is a good example. Chat-bots do seem to be owning those rather than entirely new apps.
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"?
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?
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!!!
> 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.
That's not necessarily true. Vibecoding a simple JSON -> YAML converter to translate a 2MB JSON is going to be much cheaper than including that JSON in a prompt and burning hundreds of thousands of tokens. Besides, there's lots of cases where the math simply favors a bigger one-time cost rather than paying fees in perpetuity.
Even today, an advanced AI model will realize exactly what you said, and generate a script and run it behind your back to save the costs and ensure correctness. To me, that's still using the agent directly, not vibe coding. No app gets developed in the process, and if the agent doesn't tell you, you won't even know any coding took place.
With the caveat that literal today's models are not allowed to run code themselves but instead give you the code in the chat window and ask you to run it yourself for security and safety reasons. But the capability is there.
Right, which makes the one-shot task cost the same as the permanent solution in that case. So if you wanted to do this task even twice, you would still be better off creating the tool once and just using it. Imagine if proof assistants like Lean didn't exist. Research with AI would get a whole lot more expensive if it had to re-create Lean every single time you asked it to prove something.
If you want to do literally the exact same task in literally the exact same configuration and ideally the exact same input data, then yes, it costs the same. But that solution is as permanent as it is useless.
A tool for generating a report for September 2026 is no more expensive than an agent generating a report for September 2026. But that tool is useless for you in October 2026. You'll need to generate a whole new tool for October 2026, and generating 2 tools costs as much as generating 2 reports so you're not saving anything.
Making a tool that can generate a report for any single month can easily cost 10 times more than a single report, entirely due to the extra code flow analysis required to extract the right variables in the right places. And that's without any UI. If you want UI that's another several times more tokens because UI is hard. Also it will suck compared to a simple chat window where you can ask the assistant for anything and it will understand. If you want UI that's better than the chat, that alone costs you more than everything you spent so far.
All in all, your permanent solution starts paying for itself in about 4 to 6 years, assuming you never had to update how the report is generated in the meantime.
Or you could have a very simple, very cheap script that only gets run once then gets deleted (or even better, kept for future reference to make future report scripts even cheaper to generate).
Note that this is all in the hypothetical future where AI is actually capable of one shotting such a task. If it makes mistakes, then human-made apps are still the most cost-effective option and this whole discussion is moot.
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.
> "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."
Imagine saying that to a random dude with a map and that should give you a good idea on how many info you're leaving out. You can say that the AI will infere those but that seems to be the common fallacy of AI enjoyers: They're always assuming the AI will magically find out the missing information from their prompt somehow.
I have Organic Maps installed on my phone and within a few minutes (faster than my car warming up) I can set a multi stop route (you can bookmark places). Training a random user to use such apps is also equally fast. The same happens with various pro tools: once trained, a user can be very fast with them.
> I have Organic Maps installed on my phone and within a few minutes (faster than my car warming up) I can set a multi stop route (you can bookmark places).
Wow that's slow. I can do the same in Google Maps in seconds. Can you tell me what I'm missing? I'm definitely missing something.
We live in a "capitalist" society. Moats will be built, regulations will be enacted to ensure the American Corporation controls the market segment. No one has been able to unseat Amazon, no one has been able to unseat Google, no one has been able to unseat Microsoft, no one has been able to seat Twitter, Facebook, etc. The modern market is segments that are controlled by a single entity. There will be no local models.
Afair Star Trek AI is more like 'Ok Google', and generally doesn't really seem like very agentic, more like a computer with a voice interface, able to execute simple commands and answer simple questions.
I think Star Trek is interesting in that "AI" was explored so often by so many different writers that you have the entire spectrum of agency or sophistication levels by now - the ship's computer at one end, then the Holodeck characters, Data and eventually the Borg at the other end...
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.
Sometimes it is wild to me how two people can look at the same information and come to completely different conclusions.
As best as I can tell, the only constraint the really matters right now is availability of compute, or as a buddy of mine put it "GPU GO BRRRRRRRRRRR!"
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
It seems like you're going for a rhetorical here but there are people whose usage of word processors and photo editing is and has been trending down to 0 because of AI.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
Because there are limits to the ease that "asking the AI" permits. As a trivial example, no matter how good the AI is at doing stuff, I will always be able to type `ls` faster than I can ask it "what's in the current folder?".
Because it's deterministic once written.
Because it's vastly more efficient for my use cases, and I actually value that.
Because I like the idea of making things. (It's frankly bizarre to me that this needs to be explained on a site called "Hacker News".)
> I will always be able to type `ls` faster than I can ask it "what's in the current folder?".
A folder is itself becoming a relic of the past. Most phone users nowadays aren't even aware of the concept.
> Because it's vastly more efficient for my use cases
Care to elaborate which use cases they are that benefit from AI code generation but not from AI agent? I assume it's something you do several times per day?
> Because I like the idea of making things.
I'd think you wouldn't ask the AI to do it for you then?
It feels like you want to generate code for the sake of generating code, with code generation being the goal in and of itself regardless of applicability. In that case, yeah, sticking with code generation is the best way to get code generation. Kinda like crotcheting, which is a pretty bad way of getting clothes in 21st century, but a lot of people do it anyway simply because they like crotcheting.
Limits of asking AI, `ls` being faster, determinism, efficiency, and the idea of making things are all pointless and irrelevant. None of these matter. What matters is that you get to use code generators. And to that I say - fair enough, but please don't muddy up the discussion by pretending there's anything more to it.
This is bizarrely dismissive. Why don't these things matter? And how did you come to that conclusion about what I want? That is not at all what I want.
There is no "pretending" going on here and it is insulting for you to suggest it.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
You got a computer in that era because you thought you talked to them and they did what you asked them to do.
Then you got the computer and when it started up you got a flashing K. It was a bit of a disappointment. But you flicked open the hefty manual, started reading and before long you were hooked.
One career later, I now have a computer that is very, very close to what I wanted all those years ago but with a significant and irritating genie attitude to granting my wishes.
Yeah, I did that too. That's what you did with these machines. Deeply unsatisfying! Like: a real lesson in how gnarly real computers actually were. This is my point. You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything, but it turns out "anything" took on values ranging from "hours to many hours of typing in BASIC listings and then working through inscrutable errors until something showed up on the screen but then crashed". Computers sucked ass!
>You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything..
Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?
For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...
In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way...
Figuring out inscrutable errors seems highly educational. I guess I don't have enough data to determine whether your bad experience was more or less common (probably less common on HN though). I imagine some (like yourself) found computers frustrating and bad, while others (some peer posters on HN) found them frustrating and good!
Different strokes, I guess. FWIW, I also started at 8 -- with a Commodore 64 and a Commodore Vic-20, both connected to a television -- and I found the process of trail-and-error learning my way through BASIC to be absolutely awesome.
I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that.
Aside from the Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC (CP/M!), at various times a BBC Model B and a PC, I wrote complex programs for a Sharp PC-1246 (because I had the cassette interface).
This was the very opposite of unsatisfying. I don’t recognise this idea that computers sucked.
AI-assisted coding is, to me, way more soul-destroying than hitting the limits of a simple home computer. In most regards I feel like I have reached the end of my interest in computing, and the pivot I had in mind — teaching - looks like it has been joy-deadened too. Nobody is going to want to learn how anything that is not AI actually works, tech people insist that AI will replace teachers and trainers, politicians seem to be listening, and non-tech people now resent technology.
I barely recognise the industry I spent my life in; I do not recognise your evident enthusiasm for a world that is abandoning a whole, transformative pedagogy in favour of the programming equivalent of games consoles: vibes.
I am not at all of the opinion that AI has no value, though it does not have anywhere close to the value people insist it must have for me. But it is the final nail in the coffin of the joy of tech work for me, and as a single early middle-aged man I perceive this as life changing and very likely life-shortening: unless I find something that gives my work life a sense of connected purpose again, I figure I will be gone before the Spectrum makes it to fifty.
> Nobody is going to want to learn how anything that is not AI actually works, tech people insist that AI will replace teachers and trainers, politicians seem to be listening, and non-tech people now resent technology
I disagree with most of your post, but this one the most.
Non-tech people already resent technology... Try and sit next to a non tech person use a desktop pc. It wasn't until the smart phone that the average person started to use technology like you or I recognise. And that's only because it's been simplified to the extreme for them. (I don't blame them btw).
AI is such a step change for learning and teaching... For anyone who is inquisitive. Ask it endless questions, explore ideas, get it to generate images to help you...
I did the same thing writing sample code from DirectDraw APIs to make windows games. There was a huge gap between copying tutorials and writing my own game. I never got there. LLMs could bridge the divide. Tutorials can give me the nuts and bolts and feel of whats possible. LLMs can bring into reality the bigger ideas from my mind.
Sure they can. Of course they can. "Computers suck" is practically the motto of the entire field of software security. That doesn't mean they're not fun to work with! Just that they suck.
The kids who loved computers were the ones plugging in line after line of BASIC. Well, them and the ones who just really loved games. Games were a gateway drug for a lot of kids because for so long games could really make you work for it. Games had kids making changes to config.sys and setting BLASTER environment variables, connecting to a BBS or FTP sites for downloads, and troubleshooting network issues to get LAN games running with friends. You could get pretty good at computers just getting your fix. That took a pretty strong commitment though because if all you cared about were games, and if you had them, consoles made gaming very simple. Too simple if you valued the sense of learning and accomplishment that came from winning a wrestling match with an unforgiving computer keeping you from the game you wanted to play.
I was one of the kids who didn't have a computer at home but had friends with those, and would read the BASIC listings in the magazines many times over to figure exactly what they did and think about what I could change before I visited my friends and started typing it all on their computer.
I would like to point out that you were playing a bit of goal post moving.
>Most kids felt awe.
then
>which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.
The number of kids that had computers that typed in BASIC programs was absolutely tiny, unless they were doing it as part of a school as a grade. The number of kids at home that had computers in around 93 was less than 1/5th of all households and those tended to be the most wealthy. Even then they were so expensive most parents were telling them to stay away and not letting them edit random files.
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.
> 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.
Having been one of the interested kids (but it took quite a while before any real program design or analysis clicked for me) my experience was that most of the others didn't seem all that interested (and were really just there to play games).
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.
We surely did, in those days you couldn't get computer games when you felt like, even pirated ones.
You either endless played the fews that you had, or eventually got to learn BASIC, and the more curious ones could even got one of those machine language books from the local library.
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 feel like the future is bright precisely because AI sucks so bad while also lowering the bar.
It made people not take software and software engineers for granted. Public perception of software has also finally matured. Boomers and tech CEOs fell into a tarpit that harshly exposes their stupidity while laypeople now feel like they can change the system.
This is all exciting in the best ways. My usage of AI at work and for personal projects goes as far as whatever the AI summary is on google. That's more than enough for me to get enough of a productivity boost on par with those who embarrassingly thrust themselves balls deep and refuse to pull out. Not everyone has to push the "I'm feeling lucky" button to get the same work done at the same pace.
There's nothing to be excited for. Even if AI works as well as people say (and to be clear: it very much doesn't), that future sucks ass. No more fun making things, no fun solving problems, just hand it off to the machine that does things for you. That's an awful future where every shred of joy is gone from computing.
Yes. I have a really hard time getting past the sheer scale of enablement for normal people, and we're stacking it up against, what, the joy professional developers get out of hand-cutting dovetail keys? And then like a whole cinematic universe about how if all the joinery isn't hand-cut, everything's going to collapse, which, like, obviously no.
One of my favorite journalists is Jerusalem Demsas, who just on a podcast mentioned --- in passing --- that she'd vibe-coded the photo editor they were using for her publication. That's a bananas statement! And we're all just, shrug, or worse: "that's slop!"
Don't get me wrong, I think we'll print money hats off this sentiment. By all means, do whatever you can to leave the lane we're building in as open and stigmatized as possible!
It sucks that most of those people are going to be entirely dependent on a proprietary service to build things for them and they will never actually bother learning or improving their skills, even though the tools to do so have never been more freely and widely available.
It also sucks that so many people in tech think that's a good thing.
I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.
>I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
No one is saying that anyone has to, but being able to is the whole thesis of the hacker ethos. Knowing how to do things yourself versus being dependent on corporations and simply being a consumer.
And children are learning how to program nowadays... although that won't be the case for long. My nephew is taking programming classes in school and making games in Roblox. But soon the only thing they'll teach is how to prompt Claude. We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge and that might have enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism. Now we're burning it all down and a depressing number of people like yourself on this erstwhile forum of programmers and hackers are actually dancing on the ashes.
Using a service to generate software for you is not "building programs to solve your problems." You aren't building anything, and you certainly aren't learning anything that would give you any real control over it or let you exercise freedom relative to it. AI is just proprietary software and data theft with more steps and a lot more fascism.
It doesn't just suck for us, it sucks for everyone.
Sure, lots of things are more important than "the hacker ethos". Like critical thinking and independent thought, self-reliance, the joy of actually creating something yourself (which AI is a hollow, artificial substitute for).
Why shouldn't one lament sacrificing individuality and creativity, and increasing our reliance on corporations, all for the sake of convenience?
The point is that this should not be a good place to sell us a vision incompatible with that ethos.
Some of us actually like making things, especially including the design step. Some of us were eight years old with access to a computer that booted into BASIC, and wanted to reckon with that, and eventually learn the missing steps towards a real project. Some of us take a joy in seeing someone else use our creations, greater than any hardship that was involved. Some of us value the idea that we won't have to start from scratch next time, on principle, even if it would be trivial to start from scratch anyway.
And some of us see that no, high level language to English is fundamentally not the same kind of step as low level language to high level language.
Statements like
> It could well be devastating for "the hacker ethos". You can lament that all you want. But there are more important things than "the hacker ethos".
come across as dismissive of, and not empathetic to, that point of view.
I am dismissive of that point of view, and I'm a "hacker". Not everybody here agrees on everything. I feel like I'm... pretty in tune with HN. Like, I think I could present concrete evidence on that claim.
>We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge
Lol. Not only was this not true but we weren't even close. Genuinely bizaree how you could think this.
>enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism.
Ironically, the only reality where this is remotely feasible is one where frontier llms can be run locally on phone like hardware and it becomes popular to do so.
If I tell you to build me a house and you do so, I have not built the house.
I can give you requirements, give you feedback during the process, and otherwise contribute to the design, but at the end of the day I did not build the house.
Is it? I mean I can always run to home depot and cobble something together based on books, youtube, and AI guidance, but I know when I need a professional.
I don't think any trade was ever harmed by the existence of hardware stores.
Big tech does not like DIY unless they control it and that's the actual story, not attacking devs and telling them they're obsolete. Why do you insist on avoiding that story and coming back here to argue with devs?
For me, I made things because I liked the process of making things, it was never really about the result. Much like solving crossword puzzles is about the process itself, not about getting the answer.
You are completely right. I am not entitled to anything. But before I was paid to have fun, I spent years trying to get better at it and then suddenly it completely lost its value. From fun of solving crossword puzzles to the dread of validating if crossword puzzles bot solved crossword puzzle correctly, with worse pay, less job security or opportunities.
I am not entitled for things to continue as they were, but I can still feel sad about it, you know.
I have never been able to understand this perspective. It's come up so often that it almost feels like a pro-AI propaganda strawman in the style of the "virgin vs chad" meme.
You can and should still write most of the code yourself and use AI to assist when you get stuck. Apart from saving yourself some hours because you no longer hit dead ends on google, I don't understand how that's meaningfully different from using a search engine and finding solutions on StackOverflow and GitHub. I don't even understand how people think this traditional workflow I'm suggesting is any slower than reviewing LLM output either. It takes the same cognitive load and the same time in the end. The only people who believe they can go faster and reduce cognitive load aren't just inexperienced, but also seem to have ADHD or something. Like they just wanna bask in the vibes of the machine-generated text scrolling by.
If your goal is to make something you're going to live with and maintain long term, or is more generally the foundation of a bigger idea, you can't ignore any part of the code or delegate it away. It's still writing that you're bound by like any other document.
> I have never been able to understand this perspective. It's come up so often that it almost feels like a pro-AI propaganda strawman in the style of the "virgin vs chad" meme.
The "strawman" comes from the businesses promoting the frontier LLMs and many of the best-known influencers in the space, especially on Xitter.
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.
Me too! Though I never learned how to use functions (subroutines) until I picked up C from a book later on. I still have dozens of programs I wrote back in the day in qbasic, largely based off the examples in the help system.
Agreed! What’s this weird `SCREEN` command? Punch F1 and you get a complete breakdown of all the screen modes, color palettes, and their resolutions.
As I mentioned in another comment, I think if you didn’t grow up with it, you just underestimate how amazing QBASIC was as an IDE, a programming language, and perhaps most importantly as an educational tool. I mean, it even came with actual BASIC programs (GORILLA, NIBBLES, etc) right there that you could use to explore and tweak the values as you learned.
There’s no better way to learn how something works than to physically play with the actual values, change constants, change variables, and observe how that affects the behavior of the game.
Back in the early days of the internet, there were FAQs written about everything. You could talk to people who actually knew what they were doing, as opposed to today.
Things that are easy to do don't necessarily mean that's the right way to do it. Grueling work sometimes helped you learn far more than just getting the answer to something easy.
There were a lot of books written back then on programming. My local book shops had a section dedicated to computer programming - including all the popular programming languages of the day like C, C++, Basic (and eventually Visual Basic), Java and so on. The books were technical and specific, but they were incredibly easy to find. And back in those days book shops were everywhere.
I learned C, Java, JavaScript and Obj-C from books over the years. Those books were honestly much better resources for a beginner programmer than most online resources are today.
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.
I was already coding C and C++ at the age of 16, having learnt Timex BASIC, Z80 and 6800, Turbo BASIC, GW-BASIC, Turbo Pascal, in the previous six years, starting with Timex BASIC at the age of 10.
It helped the books I got with my Timex 2068, the local library, the computer magazines with listings like the British Input ones, and our school computer labs with MS-DOS. 3.3.
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 manual. Vibe programming (by LLMs) is more accessible 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 to write numerical programs, simulations, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or 8-bit microcomputer. Also before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would write their own programs.
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 personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment
Yes, but now everyone and their mum has a personal computing device, and there's tutorials readily accessible, and five seconds of googling can bring you to an online programming environment.
In the mid 80s, something like 10% of US households had any computer at all. That the onramp is in the box doesn't really matter to the people who never saw the box.
Have you ever been diagnosed with ADD or autism? I don't expect you to answer back on that. People that have these characteristics tend to cluster in fields like tech. This means without any prior knowledge you self filtered to a set of actions you didn't know you had a much higher attraction to than a random sample of the population.
In addition this also increases the probability that your unaware of others peoples drives, likes, and abilities, which can easily mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information.
> mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information
It's worth considering that BASIC was invented to teach programming to incoming college students, most of whom had never used computers before, and most of whom would major in the humanities or social sciences. It became part of the required first-year math curriculum.
You are correct in the sense that it was originally Ivy League students (and some local high school students), a highly select group, but it still shows that 50+ years ago BASIC wasn't harder than first-year college math.
> 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.
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 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 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%
If I remember correctly QBasic even allowed configuring and controlling serial/parallel ports. Just imagine what a guy could do with that if he was bold enough to poke wires into a parallel port....
Today, computers don't even have parallal/serial ports. Everyone has to pay the USB gods their tribute to have the mercy of allowing to program arbitrary IO from their computers....And they still need some kind of serial receptacle on the other end...
I think the true generational divide was between DOS and Windows. After spending an inordinate amount of time in DOS (making the journey to Borland C), it felt awesome that you could draw onto the screen, no questions asked. I made so many games and graphical programs just drawing to the screen and then reading the input in a loop, it worked great.
Then I transitioned to Windows, and had to contend with all the complexity.. What's a Window Class and how do you write an event loop to respond to window messages, why is this all so complex.. Why is MFC somehow not really better.
Having written a simple DOS GUI (that kinda looked like Windows), I had to discover that a Windows app of equivalent functionality took more and messier code.
And forget drawing to the screen, you had to grapple with GDI drawing contexts, it was slow and bad.. (Not like Linux was any better than this regard).
As for DOS, I have had the privilege of hacking together a bitbanging VGA adapter, so I know for a fact that drawing to the screen is really as simple as setting values in an array, then, scanning it out to the display.
> As for DOS, I have had the privilege of hacking together a bitbanging VGA adapter, so I know for a fact that drawing to the screen is really as simple as setting values in an array, then, scanning it out to the display.
Screen mode 13h was definitely fantastic. Being able to light up a pixel by mapping directly to the 64k contiguous bytes in the address space was very intuitive.
And yeah dealing with Win32 stuff definitely came with its own set of complexities, I practically had the Charles Petzold Programming Windows book memorized back in the day.
But let’s also not forget Visual Basic, which outside of maybe Delphi, I'd consider one of the greatest RAD environments ever created. Being able to just grab a button onto a form and then double-click it which would instantly create a handler that you could add your logic to was very approachable even for younger audiences.
The only problem of course is that Visual Basic wasn’t bundled with Windows, so it was a lot less accessible than QBasic which came bundled for free with MS DOS 5.0.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
You get that this is a commute, right? Not charting a course through unfamiliar territory. A drive I've done thousands of times. I don't care if Waze thinks I should be on Harrison or Race. Fuck you, Waze. There's 4 reasonable routes; I just want to know which one.
It's an app with an audience of just me. That's the point. You're not supposed to want it. You have your own problems.
Apple literally has automatic commute notifications that tell you the optimal route (15 minutes via Easy St.), in this hypothetical world where your agent knows enough about you to suggest today's route, why doesn't your digital panopticon purveyor (be it Apple, Google, your car manufacturer) automatically pull that info the second you get into your car?
we could spend time answering that question or, as tptacek proposes, diy the solution because the app making app is right there, and answers to your input not Apple/Google's
FWIW I do kind of see your point. I have lots of software / hardware with a user base of one to a handful of people. I also know it sucks having to maintain software that drives your life, even if that maintenance is AI supported.
Just with the bit I quoted above, that seemed like a big misread of the market and the implications of everyone writing their own apps.
In this future, are people paying the API pricing of traffic providers? In this future, who's supplying the traffic data if no one is using their mapping apps?
It’s not the fastest route, because the algorithm is stupid as a result of trying to be smart.
It sees a small side road and thinks “I will take the user down here because there’s no traffic”
But it doesn’t consider that the side road is empty because you’ll have to turn across four lanes of traffic in rush hour. So you get stuck for twenty minutes.
If your answer is you tell it, then the obvious solution to improve the app is to provide a way of specifying a road exclusion list, and that is extremely feasible.
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 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". (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.)
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.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 82.2 ms ] threadFinding 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.
(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.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotosxiii/mind-gap-reconne...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo
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.
'Transacting' requires not only identity but accountability, a completely controlled-by-you phone cannot meaningfully transact separately from you.
I feel like a lot of new security concerns would be created.
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.
(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 )
https://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html
Incredible how anti-intellectualism keeps taking over the software engineering profession.
not just startup nerd, he also make gas town and drunken rant
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 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.
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.
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.
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 very much 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 if 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 either 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, and how. 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 systems right now. Not because it couldn't make their time working the computer better, but because they can't be bothered.
Not that this matters, because Google search alone disproves the claim that people only use phones for videos and social media.
I do personally think that we'll see regular users interested in new, different workflows than the automation ones we associate with power users, and the image generation use case you mention is a good example. Chat-bots do seem to be owning those rather than entirely new apps.
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).
With the caveat that literal today's models are not allowed to run code themselves but instead give you the code in the chat window and ask you to run it yourself for security and safety reasons. But the capability is there.
A tool for generating a report for September 2026 is no more expensive than an agent generating a report for September 2026. But that tool is useless for you in October 2026. You'll need to generate a whole new tool for October 2026, and generating 2 tools costs as much as generating 2 reports so you're not saving anything.
Making a tool that can generate a report for any single month can easily cost 10 times more than a single report, entirely due to the extra code flow analysis required to extract the right variables in the right places. And that's without any UI. If you want UI that's another several times more tokens because UI is hard. Also it will suck compared to a simple chat window where you can ask the assistant for anything and it will understand. If you want UI that's better than the chat, that alone costs you more than everything you spent so far.
All in all, your permanent solution starts paying for itself in about 4 to 6 years, assuming you never had to update how the report is generated in the meantime.
Or you could have a very simple, very cheap script that only gets run once then gets deleted (or even better, kept for future reference to make future report scripts even cheaper to generate).
Note that this is all in the hypothetical future where AI is actually capable of one shotting such a task. If it makes mistakes, then human-made apps are still the most cost-effective option and this whole discussion is moot.
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'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.
Imagine saying that to a random dude with a map and that should give you a good idea on how many info you're leaving out. You can say that the AI will infere those but that seems to be the common fallacy of AI enjoyers: They're always assuming the AI will magically find out the missing information from their prompt somehow.
I have Organic Maps installed on my phone and within a few minutes (faster than my car warming up) I can set a multi stop route (you can bookmark places). Training a random user to use such apps is also equally fast. The same happens with various pro tools: once trained, a user can be very fast with them.
Wow that's slow. I can do the same in Google Maps in seconds. Can you tell me what I'm missing? I'm definitely missing something.
My point is that text-based interfaces - and voice is just a convenience around text - are not the best interfaces for a lot of tasks.
Sometimes it is wild to me how two people can look at the same information and come to completely different conclusions.
As best as I can tell, the only constraint the really matters right now is availability of compute, or as a buddy of mine put it "GPU GO BRRRRRRRRRRR!"
Fortunately our industry has been getting people used to these for years.
So, any Apple computer?
"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]
In other news, switching from gas guzzlers to electric cars had the unfortunate side effect of highways disappearing.
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.
“Go play video games for me”
“Go create music for me”
Idk. Seems like there is still use for apps.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Because there are limits to the ease that "asking the AI" permits. As a trivial example, no matter how good the AI is at doing stuff, I will always be able to type `ls` faster than I can ask it "what's in the current folder?".
Because it's deterministic once written.
Because it's vastly more efficient for my use cases, and I actually value that.
Because I like the idea of making things. (It's frankly bizarre to me that this needs to be explained on a site called "Hacker News".)
A folder is itself becoming a relic of the past. Most phone users nowadays aren't even aware of the concept.
> Because it's vastly more efficient for my use cases
Care to elaborate which use cases they are that benefit from AI code generation but not from AI agent? I assume it's something you do several times per day?
> Because I like the idea of making things.
I'd think you wouldn't ask the AI to do it for you then?
And this is an actively bad thing.
> Care to elaborate which use cases they are that benefit from AI code generation but not from AI agent?
Making reusable things is a goal in itself.
> I'd think you wouldn't ask the AI to do it for you then?
Design is also an interesting task.
Limits of asking AI, `ls` being faster, determinism, efficiency, and the idea of making things are all pointless and irrelevant. None of these matter. What matters is that you get to use code generators. And to that I say - fair enough, but please don't muddy up the discussion by pretending there's anything more to it.
There is no "pretending" going on here and it is insulting for you to suggest it.
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.
Like many major cultural phenomenon, expect a pendulum effect, more than a beginning or end of a trend.
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.
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
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.
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.
Then you got the computer and when it started up you got a flashing K. It was a bit of a disappointment. But you flicked open the hefty manual, started reading and before long you were hooked.
One career later, I now have a computer that is very, very close to what I wanted all those years ago but with a significant and irritating genie attitude to granting my wishes.
Now if we can just tone down the genie stuff…
Wasn't it a popular format for game program listings that were published in computer magazines and books of that era?
Until like a year ago.
Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?
For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...
In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way...
May be your falling the same way for LLMs now..
I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1421/sharp-pc-1246/
This was the very opposite of unsatisfying. I don’t recognise this idea that computers sucked.
AI-assisted coding is, to me, way more soul-destroying than hitting the limits of a simple home computer. In most regards I feel like I have reached the end of my interest in computing, and the pivot I had in mind — teaching - looks like it has been joy-deadened too. Nobody is going to want to learn how anything that is not AI actually works, tech people insist that AI will replace teachers and trainers, politicians seem to be listening, and non-tech people now resent technology.
I barely recognise the industry I spent my life in; I do not recognise your evident enthusiasm for a world that is abandoning a whole, transformative pedagogy in favour of the programming equivalent of games consoles: vibes.
I am not at all of the opinion that AI has no value, though it does not have anywhere close to the value people insist it must have for me. But it is the final nail in the coffin of the joy of tech work for me, and as a single early middle-aged man I perceive this as life changing and very likely life-shortening: unless I find something that gives my work life a sense of connected purpose again, I figure I will be gone before the Spectrum makes it to fifty.
Same here. I can understand indifference, but this I don't get.
FFS I even loved playing with calculators!
I disagree with most of your post, but this one the most.
Non-tech people already resent technology... Try and sit next to a non tech person use a desktop pc. It wasn't until the smart phone that the average person started to use technology like you or I recognise. And that's only because it's been simplified to the extreme for them. (I don't blame them btw).
AI is such a step change for learning and teaching... For anyone who is inquisitive. Ask it endless questions, explore ideas, get it to generate images to help you...
They can't have sucked that much if you saw fit to build a career around them.
>Most kids felt awe.
then
>which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.
The number of kids that had computers that typed in BASIC programs was absolutely tiny, unless they were doing it as part of a school as a grade. The number of kids at home that had computers in around 93 was less than 1/5th of all households and those tended to be the most wealthy. Even then they were so expensive most parents were telling them to stay away and not letting them edit random files.
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.
Having been one of the interested kids (but it took quite a while before any real program design or analysis clicked for me) my experience was that most of the others didn't seem all that interested (and were really just there to play games).
You either endless played the fews that you had, or eventually got to learn BASIC, and the more curious ones could even got one of those machine language books from the local library.
“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.”
I hope this makes you feel better: all industries are doomed. But few rise and fall in one lifetime.
Adopters feel the future is brighter than ever.
I feel like the future is bright precisely because AI sucks so bad while also lowering the bar.
It made people not take software and software engineers for granted. Public perception of software has also finally matured. Boomers and tech CEOs fell into a tarpit that harshly exposes their stupidity while laypeople now feel like they can change the system.
This is all exciting in the best ways. My usage of AI at work and for personal projects goes as far as whatever the AI summary is on google. That's more than enough for me to get enough of a productivity boost on par with those who embarrassingly thrust themselves balls deep and refuse to pull out. Not everyone has to push the "I'm feeling lucky" button to get the same work done at the same pace.
One of my favorite journalists is Jerusalem Demsas, who just on a podcast mentioned --- in passing --- that she'd vibe-coded the photo editor they were using for her publication. That's a bananas statement! And we're all just, shrug, or worse: "that's slop!"
Don't get me wrong, I think we'll print money hats off this sentiment. By all means, do whatever you can to leave the lane we're building in as open and stigmatized as possible!
It also sucks that so many people in tech think that's a good thing.
I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.
No one is saying that anyone has to, but being able to is the whole thesis of the hacker ethos. Knowing how to do things yourself versus being dependent on corporations and simply being a consumer.
And children are learning how to program nowadays... although that won't be the case for long. My nephew is taking programming classes in school and making games in Roblox. But soon the only thing they'll teach is how to prompt Claude. We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge and that might have enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism. Now we're burning it all down and a depressing number of people like yourself on this erstwhile forum of programmers and hackers are actually dancing on the ashes.
Using a service to generate software for you is not "building programs to solve your problems." You aren't building anything, and you certainly aren't learning anything that would give you any real control over it or let you exercise freedom relative to it. AI is just proprietary software and data theft with more steps and a lot more fascism.
It doesn't just suck for us, it sucks for everyone.
Why shouldn't one lament sacrificing individuality and creativity, and increasing our reliance on corporations, all for the sake of convenience?
Some of us actually like making things, especially including the design step. Some of us were eight years old with access to a computer that booted into BASIC, and wanted to reckon with that, and eventually learn the missing steps towards a real project. Some of us take a joy in seeing someone else use our creations, greater than any hardship that was involved. Some of us value the idea that we won't have to start from scratch next time, on principle, even if it would be trivial to start from scratch anyway.
And some of us see that no, high level language to English is fundamentally not the same kind of step as low level language to high level language.
Statements like
> It could well be devastating for "the hacker ethos". You can lament that all you want. But there are more important things than "the hacker ethos".
come across as dismissive of, and not empathetic to, that point of view.
Lol. Not only was this not true but we weren't even close. Genuinely bizaree how you could think this.
>enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism.
Ironically, the only reality where this is remotely feasible is one where frontier llms can be run locally on phone like hardware and it becomes popular to do so.
I can give you requirements, give you feedback during the process, and otherwise contribute to the design, but at the end of the day I did not build the house.
I don't think any trade was ever harmed by the existence of hardware stores.
Big tech does not like DIY unless they control it and that's the actual story, not attacking devs and telling them they're obsolete. Why do you insist on avoiding that story and coming back here to argue with devs?
Are you telling us the only reason why making things was fun is because it made you "special"?
Unless you're complaining you can't be paid to do it the old way. But none of us were paid to have fun, we were paid to deliver results.
I am not entitled for things to continue as they were, but I can still feel sad about it, you know.
You can and should still write most of the code yourself and use AI to assist when you get stuck. Apart from saving yourself some hours because you no longer hit dead ends on google, I don't understand how that's meaningfully different from using a search engine and finding solutions on StackOverflow and GitHub. I don't even understand how people think this traditional workflow I'm suggesting is any slower than reviewing LLM output either. It takes the same cognitive load and the same time in the end. The only people who believe they can go faster and reduce cognitive load aren't just inexperienced, but also seem to have ADHD or something. Like they just wanna bask in the vibes of the machine-generated text scrolling by.
If your goal is to make something you're going to live with and maintain long term, or is more generally the foundation of a bigger idea, you can't ignore any part of the code or delegate it away. It's still writing that you're bound by like any other document.
The "strawman" comes from the businesses promoting the frontier LLMs and many of the best-known influencers in the space, especially on Xitter.
QBasic's bultin help/documentation was good enough for me..
As I mentioned in another comment, I think if you didn’t grow up with it, you just underestimate how amazing QBASIC was as an IDE, a programming language, and perhaps most importantly as an educational tool. I mean, it even came with actual BASIC programs (GORILLA, NIBBLES, etc) right there that you could use to explore and tweak the values as you learned.
There’s no better way to learn how something works than to physically play with the actual values, change constants, change variables, and observe how that affects the behavior of the game.
If I remember correctly, there were even sample programs included in this documentation.
For example GET/PUT had this one:
I learned C, Java, JavaScript and Obj-C from books over the years. Those books were honestly much better resources for a beginner programmer than most online resources are today.
I actually still don't know BASIC.
It helped the books I got with my Timex 2068, the local library, the computer magazines with listings like the British Input ones, and our school computer labs with MS-DOS. 3.3.
BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough to write numerical programs, simulations, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or 8-bit microcomputer. Also before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would write their own programs.
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.
Yes, but now everyone and their mum has a personal computing device, and there's tutorials readily accessible, and five seconds of googling can bring you to an online programming environment.
In addition this also increases the probability that your unaware of others peoples drives, likes, and abilities, which can easily mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information.
It's worth considering that BASIC was invented to teach programming to incoming college students, most of whom had never used computers before, and most of whom would major in the humanities or social sciences. It became part of the required first-year math curriculum.
You are correct in the sense that it was originally Ivy League students (and some local high school students), a highly select group, but it still shows that 50+ years ago BASIC wasn't harder than first-year college math.
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 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.
Please.
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.
..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.
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:
Today, computers don't even have parallal/serial ports. Everyone has to pay the USB gods their tribute to have the mercy of allowing to program arbitrary IO from their computers....And they still need some kind of serial receptacle on the other end...
Then I transitioned to Windows, and had to contend with all the complexity.. What's a Window Class and how do you write an event loop to respond to window messages, why is this all so complex.. Why is MFC somehow not really better.
Having written a simple DOS GUI (that kinda looked like Windows), I had to discover that a Windows app of equivalent functionality took more and messier code.
And forget drawing to the screen, you had to grapple with GDI drawing contexts, it was slow and bad.. (Not like Linux was any better than this regard).
As for DOS, I have had the privilege of hacking together a bitbanging VGA adapter, so I know for a fact that drawing to the screen is really as simple as setting values in an array, then, scanning it out to the display.
Screen mode 13h was definitely fantastic. Being able to light up a pixel by mapping directly to the 64k contiguous bytes in the address space was very intuitive.
And yeah dealing with Win32 stuff definitely came with its own set of complexities, I practically had the Charles Petzold Programming Windows book memorized back in the day.
But let’s also not forget Visual Basic, which outside of maybe Delphi, I'd consider one of the greatest RAD environments ever created. Being able to just grab a button onto a form and then double-click it which would instantly create a handler that you could add your logic to was very approachable even for younger audiences.
The only problem of course is that Visual Basic wasn’t bundled with Windows, so it was a lot less accessible than QBasic which came bundled for free with MS DOS 5.0.
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.
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.
Some kids thought it was awesome to make the computer do stuff and learned how to program.
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 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.
> 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.
It's an app with an audience of just me. That's the point. You're not supposed to want it. You have your own problems.
Just with the bit I quoted above, that seemed like a big misread of the market and the implications of everyone writing their own apps.
In this future, are people paying the API pricing of traffic providers? In this future, who's supplying the traffic data if no one is using their mapping apps?
It sees a small side road and thinks “I will take the user down here because there’s no traffic” But it doesn’t consider that the side road is empty because you’ll have to turn across four lanes of traffic in rush hour. So you get stuck for twenty minutes.
If your answer is you tell it, then the obvious solution to improve the app is to provide a way of specifying a road exclusion list, and that is extremely feasible.
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.