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.
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 But it's not the idea of the OS that's outdated - it's the idea of apps.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.
An AI assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. An application written by an AI assistant, if it doesn't just call an LLM at runtime, will mostly likely produce the same answer for the same inputs. That is, unless there's something intrinsic to its business logic that makes it nondeterministic.
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
And when applicable, the program would be much more efficient than the LLM.
So it would really be beneficial for the LLMs to be able to have their own environments to write and run code, but also to store those programs for later use automatically.
I want an agent studio and execution sandbox where my LLM driven assistant builds and maintains my apps with a receipt or SBOM like history of what it did to create each app. Determinism built per use case with non deterministic assistance orchestrating the build and management layer. Extra credit if I can trivially share and collaborate with others per “deterministic silo” via a shared link. Something like Claude Code + AWS Lambda|(Docker|Podman) + Tangled.org with LLM code generation for my phone and workstation.
The LLMs empower for building, the determinism improves output-expectation alignment.
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.
> That makes a lot of sense in a world where we’re importing all our software from strangers. It makes less sense in the world we’re heading to, where most of the software we’re carving up fiefdoms for has the same provenance.
If I'm running software written by an LLM, even if I was the one who prompted the LLM, I would still want my OS to treat it as if written by a stranger.
I know he's not necessarily talking about relaxing security models here, but he's not being very specific about his vision otherwise.
I think OP may be onto something real, while you are definitely right if we translate concepts directly. But maybe the challenge, with current platforms included, is because we try to cram identities by reference. If a phone had its own identity, with which you transact as with any party then lots of the security concerns would dissolve. To tone down crankiness, I refer to identity in the technical sense, not personality etc. This doesn’t solve the challenge but it might point to a different foundation for a security model.
Nope. There has never been a "good" post written in this genre ("I'm leaving my last team, here's my new project") and I'm not going to waste interesting bits on my pro-forma transition post.
I didn't submit this! Happy to chat about it, but I feel like I was pretty clear in the post that I wasn't bidding for the front page.
I love the idea that normal people building software to solve real problems in their life is, necessarily, a toy; the only real software is blessed by our sacred priesthood of PLT experts.
Uncharitably... because eventually they hope to produce a phone that isn't running iOS or Android?
More charitably because the title is actually an important question right now in the abstract for almost everything, not just operating systems.
But the forces that shape the question are so large and hard to get a handle on when we are living through the moment that you have to start thinking about it somewhere, why not OSes?
Taking it at face value, it seems to me this will also collapse and get folded into the model.
Unclear what will be left next to it. It will just live on your phone and take care of everything. The apps will be markdown files describing what they do, probably compiled ahead of time for latency.
But the model will be in control, so what else is left to implement besides giving it bash, a compiler and a display?
I guess there is value in the year before that happens.
I agree with the gist of how weird everything is going to get, and how we are living in a time where people haven't come close to internalizing the shift.
IMO even this AI phone is doomed in the slightly longer run.
One more step into the weirdness and people will just be working with AI to build their own bespoke phone with the specs sent over to a manufacturer that is "like PCBWay, but spits out whole devices".
I have no idea what this does to society, the economy, etc when we reach a point where nobody really "needs" any kind of middleman for almost anything (well, except for things they actually really need, like food and shelter), but it looks like I'll see it happen for a bit before I die.
> Consider: what does computing look like in a world where many (maybe most) applications have an audience of just 1-2 people? How is software distributed? What does it run on?
The same. The slop apps remain just that. They may do something useful for you, but that's it. A bit like a branch in a repository.
It's the same thing as looking down your nose at people who use Excel as a database because it's not a "real" database.
Yes, I'm sure we all have horror stories about spreadsheets that got out of hand, but that ignores the thousands (or more) spreadsheets that are silently productive everyday.
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.
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.)
There could be some interesting actual OS design innovations for new permissions, access control, and sandboxing systems that are designed from the ground up for these "conjurable" experiences (or even OS components themself).
Finding some balance between access and safety for vibe-conjuring parts of the OS in a way that's still powerful but won't accidentally nuke or corrupt itself.
I do think there's some interesting space to be explored in capability-based systems, but even then I think it would mostly end up looking similar to how existing systems are, just with one more element added
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.
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
So it would really be beneficial for the LLMs to be able to have their own environments to write and run code, but also to store those programs for later use automatically.
The LLMs empower for building, the determinism improves output-expectation alignment.
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.
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 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.
Roblox is a game where you make the game. This sounds like an OS where you make the OS.
Probably could have spelled it out more, being too pithy perhaps
Uncharitably... because eventually they hope to produce a phone that isn't running iOS or Android?
More charitably because the title is actually an important question right now in the abstract for almost everything, not just operating systems.
But the forces that shape the question are so large and hard to get a handle on when we are living through the moment that you have to start thinking about it somewhere, why not OSes?
Unclear what will be left next to it. It will just live on your phone and take care of everything. The apps will be markdown files describing what they do, probably compiled ahead of time for latency.
But the model will be in control, so what else is left to implement besides giving it bash, a compiler and a display?
I guess there is value in the year before that happens.
IMO even this AI phone is doomed in the slightly longer run.
One more step into the weirdness and people will just be working with AI to build their own bespoke phone with the specs sent over to a manufacturer that is "like PCBWay, but spits out whole devices".
I have no idea what this does to society, the economy, etc when we reach a point where nobody really "needs" any kind of middleman for almost anything (well, except for things they actually really need, like food and shelter), but it looks like I'll see it happen for a bit before I die.
not just startup nerd, he also make gas town and drunken rant
The same. The slop apps remain just that. They may do something useful for you, but that's it. A bit like a branch in a repository.
Yes, I'm sure we all have horror stories about spreadsheets that got out of hand, but that ignores the thousands (or more) spreadsheets that are silently productive everyday.
(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.)
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.