What even is an OS now?

I hope this makes you feel better: all industries are doomed. But few rise and fall in one lifetime.

“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.”

> 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.

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.

“Go play video games for me”

“Go create music for me”

Idk. Seems like there is still use for apps.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

"ChatGPT, please send <username> a message with the following contents: <content>. Oh, what platform? Create the platform to send the message for me. That username doesn't mean anything on this brand new platform? Uhhhh" [insert step where the AI-psychotic decides to give up on communicating with humans and tells ChatGPT to roleplay as the person they intended to message, I guess]

To me they're failing to see the even bigger picture that maybe even Hey itself is outdated in the Ai era and not only is its Ruby framework antiquated... the whole Hey service is too.

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.

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.

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.

Uncharitably... because eventually they hope to produce a phone that isn't running iOS or Android?

More charitably because the title is actually an important question right now in the abstract for almost everything, not just operating systems.

But the forces that shape the question are so large and hard to get a handle on when we are living through the moment that you have to start thinking about it somewhere, why not OSes?

(The irony is that all the reading that's gone into our design is like, old CSAIL papers. Maybe it's true! Maybe everything we're doing is just crate-digging through old settled computer science. That would be on brand. I should find a way to work Athena into it. Maybe we'll use Zephyr for messaging.)

The most recent was Loris Degioanni yesterday in a conference talk.

I think saying " This dumb dumb doesn't know what a device driver is" is a very incorrect read since you know, he's written a bunch of them

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.