What even is an OS now? (sockpuppet.org)

These are bad-faith arguments toward "What about self modifying software".

Self modifying software has no grounds in reality or predictable behavior. It is an unreasonable expectation that software is magic. You would not fly on a self-modifying airplane. This is not a future i want to live in.

No; sorry, no.

If you're looking for a UX idea, when the phone boots, it asks "What are the top 5 things you do?". And that's how the phone experience starts.

All the best. (Ignore the silly haters, they're lost in their AI pessimism to just look forward to a new intersting thing).

I'm pretty AI pilled, and I'm building a local-first personal software platform, but I dunno... I've been feeling like i need to cram the "AI spirit" into very specifically shaped boxes to actually build robust software tastefully at speed. Like software on the outside and AI on the inside instead of the other way around.

I do think the future of computing will definitely be more like the Linux diaspora than the apple ecosystem, but also.. it is easy to get "duped" by AI without actually shipping. I'm starting to want "KPIs" to help me measure if my time is actually well spent against the things i care about.

I guess I'm extrapolating from your post, but even if the programming language is English, we'll probably still want to spend a large amount of additional compute to produce "artifacts" that have things like performant code, security hardening, and certified taste.

I do think the future of computing will definitely be more like the Linux diaspora than the apple ecosystem, but also... when i first got into linux i spent way too long trying to get my desktop perfectly aesthetic because it was all suddenly malleable. Now i vibe more with Debian.

I wish you luck, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with! Fun times ahead for sure.

I completely agree that we haven’t even gotten past the first post yet in terms of the magnitude of change that is likely to occur. People fail to comprehend that we’re still assimilating the Internet as a means of communication. Cell phones. It will be decades before what we have today is fully utilized, let alone what is likely to be developed. Anyway, thanks for the article.

As someone who's building its news project on it, it's both reassuring, but also not since you're leaving..

1. When you write a comment in a discussion of an article, be upfront with being the author. It took me a while to understand that from your comment. "Author here" is a thing.

2. Your article itself doesn't have clear authorship stated. At the very bottom there is a copyright notice, but that's pretty generic and not a single person either. Just place your name at the top together with a date. Not everybody knows you or follows your blog.

3. When I read this ...

> When I was a little kid, a family friend sold us our first “computer” — scare quotes because I’m pretty sure it was a VTech Laser 200 clone, a chiclet keyboard Z80 that ran off cassette tapes and plugged into our TV.

.. I prepared to stop reading since .. how is that not a computer? After another paragraph or two which just felt like rambling, I gave up.

I actually think this post gets the point across better than most.

The model I see is that it is like a butler instead of a home computer, like you are driving into a strange town and looking for food and you are not going to open the McDonald's app but instead your agent does a search and through a conversational recommender you get sent somewhere. It might be sitting in your pocket the whole time and you are talking to it through something like AirPods. Maybe you put on smart glasses and it can show you things.

Apple can't give you the A.I.-native phone because it is too dependent on the app economy. For a few months I've been asking "Who is working on this?" and figured it was one of those cursed ideas that Silicon Valley would be unable to fund much like the pharmaceutical-industrial complex of Cambridge was unable to fund Facebook. I was expecting it to come out of some hungry Chinese manufacturer so I'm happy to see another horse in this race.

(e.g. I love the image that Meta has developed around Muse which makes it look like it is a "butler" when it is really much more like the old Kraftwerk song where "I program my home computer")

I hear what you’re saying, but we don’t have a word for that different thing. OS means the kernel. But OS also means the entire distribution - all of macOS, all of iOS, all of windows, Ubuntu, Android, etc.

Until we have a standard word for the ui “shell” that comes out of the box with the OS distribution, people - including me - are gonna call (and think of it) as the OS. Or part of the os. Or something like that.

LLMs are not OSes and never will be, they will always need some software to first bootstrap the hardware before the software which processes the weighting can begin.

Its like we need Richard Stallman to come and argue the difference between GNU and Linux again!

In the context of a microcontroller, is it an RTOS? How is that different from something like Embassy with Rust, where hardware allocation and coordination is handled more at build time and less at runtime? In the context of a something showing up on a screen, is an OS something providing a UI framework and hardware abstraction - something like Win32 or Cocoa? What does that make Chrome?

In 2006 it felt like an answer to the question "what is an OS" was straightforward. In 2026, I'm rather confident that I don't have a single, simple answer. If there were ever a time to re-assess what we thought we knew about computing - now seems like a good time to do it.

Streaming is fair. Netflix can dictate their rules. I can decide not to pay for their content.

The lion's share of value in a product like Salesforce is the ability to say "we run Salesforce" and have everyone know what you mean and have ready answers to all your problems even if they're not perfectly tailored (or cheap). Same thing with OS really. If natural language is now the most powerful programming language then having shared vocabulary on technical topics is more valuable than ever.

I recently replaced my $HEALTHCARE_APP with the PWA of their website. It was the *exact* same. The app was just a webview (and a pretty good one at that!)

It makes me really question how much “security” these services need when they have websites that can do everything the app can do.

“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.

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.

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.

> Perhaps I have no imagination, but I don't feel like having an LLM make applications on my phone. I want good software that someone that I trust wrote.

I do not use LLM either, and do not intend to do. I can write my own programs. Even if someone does want to use LLM, it should neither be required nor expected nor the default (and there are also reasons why I think that it should be discouraged to use LLM too much); you should be able to write the scripts and programs by yourself if you want to do it that way (and the computer made to make this possible to do without LLM), even if some people can make LLM to do it at their option, but it should not to require LLM and AI.

I also think that the computer that can start with a programming language such as BASIC or Forth (without first needing menus and GUI to access all of the programs) is useful, and that it is not as good that many modern computers do not do like that.

Nothing. Thomas, as most ambitious start up founders do according to PG, is living in the future.

  There are already a few places that are living in the future in this respect. Silicon Valley is one of them: an unknown person working on a strange-sounding idea won't automatically be dismissed the way they would back home ...

  The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could.

Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.

I don't understand why people are still thinking that clicking on stuff will still be a desirable thing in the future.

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 doubt it. Most people would rather stab at their phone to download an app that just does what they want than explain to a chatbot over a period of minutes/hours and several reiterations to get it to spew out what they want, let alone what kind of software they want it to make for them. Most people can barely articulate what they want in the first place.

The market for applications isn't going anywhere and neither is the OS. I can't imagine booting a computer directly into a chat window where I have to explain to a bot what I wish would show up on my screen, where on my screen, and how it should look. What a total nightmare that would be!

Even if what passes for "AI" these days was as smart and capable as the computers on Star Trek (and it very much isn't) you wouldn't want to ask it for everything. Even the Enterprise had an OS that people interacted with. What they also had though was an OS with configurable interfaces that people could customize according to their current task and preferred workflow.

That sort of thing is maybe possible in the future for "AI" empowered operating systems we might live to see, but 90% of the people using computers aren't going to bother with any of that, just like they've never seen the settings/options in most of their applications or their operating system right now. Not because it couldn't make their time working the computer better, but because they just can't be bothered.

The writer of this piece remembers how, as a child, computers promised to let him write his own software and games and it seemed like there were endless possibilities until the reality that programing takes effort killed a little of that enthusiasm (although not enough that he didn't eventually become a programmer), but many people never see a computer as anything more than a means to an end or a device for mainly passive content consumption.

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).

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.

"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]

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.

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.

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...

Current capabilities are not there. You need software engineers to keep it going. And even then as intoxicating as it might be to be able to bring to life all the side projects you often had no energy/skill to finish, today it is still may be cost / “cognitive load” -effective to buy off the shelf apps that somebody else has to maintain (even if they are not as personal / less customized for your use-case).

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.

I didn't submit this! Happy to chat about it, but I feel like I was pretty clear in the post that I wasn't bidding for the front page.

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.

In my opinion, an OS that hosts a local agent can produce things for you on the fly in response to a particular task in addition to the baseline set of features.

Too often have I ran into "you can't do that" in operating systems, especially Macos where you either have to buy a paid app to implement what they should have already, or what you want is niche enough that you have to build it yourself.

Plus and agent can operate across your hardware including the cloud. I could ask something like "graphics cards are expensive and always out of stock so when some pop up can you notify me and show me the price etc" and then receive a rich alert on whatever device I happen to be using at the time it happens, once agents are aware of where we are and what we're doing (yes, it will be pretty dystopian with current governments and the drooling animals who vote for tribalism).

Or being able to be like "I want my photo gallery to show animated thumbnails when I've taken a series of photos of the same subject. Oh, little bit slower like one every second thanks" boom done.

And much UI will becomes defunct in the first place, UI only exists because of many annoying discrete steps we have to do to get something done. If I can just ask an agent to do the thing I want then I don't care about that.

It's like how I only need to make a PowerPoint now and then and every time I open it I've completely forgotten where all of the stupid fucking buttons are in the stupid fucking ribbon bullshit they made.

The barrier to entry is lower now because of AI. Even though I code, I ask the AI to write a lot of little helper apps for my wife who homeschools our kids, and I don't code review many of them. I only do enough user testing to ensure they function as requested.

Armed with this knowledge, I have tried in vain to get various family and friends who are not technically minded to do anything like this. In some cases, they just tell me that they can't think of anything the AI can help with.

Many things that seem simple to them are more complex, and they can't tell the difference between simple apps that the AI can knock out in a few minutes and larger projects that require internet hosting and/or vastly more AI credits than they would ever be willing to pay for.

By far the biggest problem is that many of them are not very good at describing what they want. For simple apps, you can go back and forth with the AI to ask for changes, but the more complex the solution, the more its becomes like a traditional engineering design project where carefully though out design of features and their interactions are critical for success. The new "code" may be more like human language, but the user facing details must still be specified.

Claude especially, where you might say “how can I do task xyz more quickly” and Claude responds with a little JS app. This creates an expectation that it’s possible to do anything if you ask Claude right.

I have seen this first hand where my partner - a deeply non technical person - came to ask what an API token is and how she can get one for Canva. Claude was busy automating her Canva -> Pinterest workflow.

She now has a half dozen of these things and hunts through her Claude chats to reuse them.

Honestly, as a long time Emacs user, agents are amazing because when all your functionality and data lives in open source code and text files, the world is literally your oyster.

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.

It seems to me as if the current entrepreneur playbook largely is to run really fast and hope the judicial system doesn't catch up.

What a load of self-aggrandizing bullshit. How do we keep minting these guys with a completely confabulated sense of perspective?

People could already vibe-code simple products today, but there's hardly any non-programmers that do. This is even true for businesses. For the last year people have been boasting about canceling their SaaS products, but nothing seems to have changed. SaaS stocks got hit by the ai hysteria in January, but many are back to previous levels and some even higher. There's an Indiehacker on Twitter whose product is a simple stage timer. It's not a hardware product. It's literally just the software for a stage timer. One would expect his business to have died already, but he's apparently doing completely fine.