This AI Operating System Hallucinates Pseudo-Software — Even Notepad — On Demand

Microsoft’s Copilot integration into the Windows operating system has been an absolute disaster. As far as I’m aware, everyone hates it. Many people may have embraced AI workflows, but it seems that we all still expect AI to be distinct from the OS itself. But what if we abandoned that concept? The result could be something like VibeOS, which hallucinates all of its software and displayed content on demand.

This is a very weird concept and it probably doesn’t work in the way you’re thinking. VibeOS is a real operating system that can boot up on real hardware (though the live demonstration posted by Zev.3R is on a virtual machine), and it integrates AI to its core.

I don’t mean that in a buzzwordy, marketing hype kind of way. I mean it in a dystopian way.

To understand what it does, consider the calculator program that ships with your favorite desktop OS. Someone wrote the code for that program and you’re interacting with the code’s mathematical algorithms through the UI. If you wanted to, you could use AI to generate a similar calculator app, but the AI would still just be writing code similar to what humans write.

VibeOS ditches all of that. The calculator “program” doesn’t have any underlying code at all. When you launch it, the OS’s AI (really Claude with a Kernel agent) simply generates the look of a user interface and monitors what you do with it. The AI then generates a result, which may or may not be accurate.

It isn’t like using a calculator, it is like telling Gemini “draw me a picture of a calculator program showing the square root of 16” and hopefully the AI will put a “4” into the results area of the UI it scribbled on the screen.

The same is true for everything else in the operating system. If you browse “the internet,” what you’re really seeing is the AI’s best guess at what a page might look like, including hallucinated copy.

It goes further, too. Because none of that is based on code, VibeOS can reproduce the experience of using any software you can think of—or it can at least try. If you ask it to launch Excel, it will do its best to show you an Excel-like UI based on what it knows about Excel and will try to simulate the appearance of what would happen within that software.

It also works with completely fictional software that you make up on the spot. It doesn’t matter if that makes sense or not, or even if such software is possible. The AI will do its best to make it look like it is working in the way that it thinks you want.

What should you make of all of this? I have no idea. But it is fascinating, because it completely disregards almost everything we know about computing.

And if you want to try it for yourself, you can install it in Docker. You can also try the online demo (though it failed for me).