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.