AI Is About to Kill the Operating System as We Know It
What Even Is an OS Now?
The author, leaving Fly.io for a new project, argues that AI is dissolving the boundary between programmers and users. Soon, most software will be conjured by individuals for an audience of one or two, not bought from strangers. This shift makes the modern OS—designed to isolate untrusted apps—obsolete. He's building a phone that isn't meant to run fixed-function applications, but to build apps for you on demand.
The core purpose of a modern operating system is to partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate. 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.
- tptacek
Hey, all. I really don't know what to do with a post like this.
I'm being sincere when I say (as I've said on two threads here) that this genre of posts --- "I'm leaving this company I've been very publicly associated with, and here's the new thing I'm doing" --- is deeply cursed. There's no way to say anything interesting without it just stinking like an ad for the new thing.
Obviously, anything at all you say about a commercial project you're working on is easily read as promotional. And you're right, this kind of writing almost always is promotional. But there's a way to do it where at least you're trying to be in conversation with your peers, rather than hitting people over the head with how awesome you think the project is.
But I don't know how to do that in a post like this. I think the only way to read it is as, like, an investor memo. Not my goal, but I don't make the rules.
So my strategy here is just to stay kind of vague, and talk about where I think the world is going, rather than the specific thing we're doing. I can talk your ears off about capability systems, datalog, models driving hardware, virtualization, whatever. Those are fun conversations and I'm very psyched to have them; it's what lights me up about the work we're doing now.
But I don't think it can work here. I didn't submit this post and I didn't upvote it. I wrote it because I didn't want the whole thing I'm leaving Fly.io for to be wrapped up in some dumb Twitter thread.
If you're unsatisfied with […]
- utopiah
I feel like most articles challenging OSes have no idea what an OS is.
Sure question what the latest tool can offer and how to integrate with it... but that's just being an app, or a window manager, or a package manager, or a distribution, that's not challenging what the OS itself is and does.
If your OS doesn't change how a computer allocates resources, then you are talking about higher level, and that can be super valuable too, arguably more valuable, but ... that's a different thing.
PS: also chroot (half a century, just checked for the fun of it), jails, containers, VMs, etc limiting how the allocation can be done do exist and have been used for decades already.
- meredithbloom
> "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.
- linkregister
I don't know what's wrong with my perspective. I cannot relate to this at all.
I am at a job where I am paid well to build software to do things in a distributed system that processes information across various external systems (some with physical world impacts). The outcome of that computing is revenue for the company. Using agent-wrapped LLMs makes the software authorship component of the job really fast. The rest is virtually the same speed.
For Thomas's mobile computing examples, these are done really well by my phone's operating system's built-in voice command system, mature for a decade by now.
At home, I use software that is well-crafted to do some thing. Or I write a series of scripts to do narrow things that for some reason aren't in Aptitude or Snap, for example "copy all the photos off my iPhone and rename them and sort them by date in my filesystem".
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.
Thomas has been a successful cryptographer, vulnerability analyst, and entrepreneur, so he probably knows what he's doing. I just don't get it.
- Xirdus
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.
- sollewitt
You can’t
> partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate.
without
> provide access to hardware resources
That’s still definitely what an OS does. The application model is often very loosely coupled. See web browsers.
A difference between embedded systems and operating systems is the ability to provide access to hardware (in such a way as to isolate and dictate communication) _dynamically_ with a-prior unknown requests.
- chroma_zone
> 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.
- criemen
My colleague Steve Sanderson showed off VibeOS already back in June https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfyZhV1dKM
Sounds like this is a more serious and phone-centered take on what Steve demoed.
We sure live in interesting times.
- II2II
I doubt that we are entering a world where people will be using AI to write their own little apps, and that is coming from someone who does it.
All you need to do is look at history to realise that. We had things like BASIC, HyperCard, and the early web that attracted droves of people who were excited by the opportunities. While a lot of those people went into industry to write software for other people, a lot did not. Most people, I suspect, didn't even explore the potential because they simply don't think of computers as programmable machines -- even if they were aware that there are people who program computers for a living.
- nxc18
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 ha […]