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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.