What Even Counts as an OS Anymore?

The author of the well-known blog sockpuppet.org, candidly warning that he's "talking his book," announces his departure from Fly.io for a new venture — and uses the occasion to reflect on how artificial intelligence is reshaping the very nature of computing.

The computer of his childhood

He recalls his first "computer" — a VTech Laser 200 clone built on a Z80, with a chiclet keyboard, cassette tapes instead of disks, and a boot straight into BASIC. The eight-year-old who dreamed of making games learned a bitter lesson fast: computers weren't as awesome as he'd imagined. Later, drawn into programming through security work, he only confirmed it. He could churn out fast network servers, but building a whole word processor felt like being asked to build a diesel locomotive.

Now, he writes, everything has suddenly changed: computers finally work the way he thought they did at eight. Over recent months he has been cranking out native macOS apps with plain English as his programming language. His Mac menu bar is now cluttered with icons for programs he conjured up just for himself.

An audience of one or two

The crucial boundary AI is knocking down, he argues, isn't between frontend and backend but between programmers and users. Soon, he claims, every power user will do the same. Applications will solve deeply personal problems with an audience of just one or two people: an accurate forecast for one Chicago neighborhood, advice on which street to take home, a reminder about a meeting you're missing. The tasks sound trivial — that's the point: no one would have built serious software for them before.

Hence the question about operating systems. Their true purpose, he reminds us, is to partition foreign applications off from each other and tightly control how they talk. That makes sense when all our software comes from strangers. But in a world where nearly all programs share the same provenance and are constantly reshaped on their creator's whim, that architecture loses its rationale.

A phone without prefab apps

So here is the new project: a phone not designed to run fixed-function, prefabricated applications. Every phone of 2026, he notes, was planned back in 2023, and their soul is stuck in the 1970s — a miniaturized PDP-11 running canned software. His device would instead build apps right on the phone, on demand.

He's fully aware he sounds like yet another startup guy preaching "the future of programming." Much he deliberately leaves unsaid, to strip the whiff of a launch pitch off the technical ideas. His conclusion: the industry is destabilized as never before since the personal computer arrived, and we should all learn to think like kids again — the kids who believed a computer could do anything.

Source: Hacker News