Did not boot for me on an IBM PS/2 Model 30 (80286).
Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
161–170 of 174 posts
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#162This looked great, I started reading things, and then I just kept reading and reading the voluminous description details, and it was an immediate indication to me that the whole thing was built up by Claude. Confirmed in the repo. I closed the tab. I appreciate the topic, interest, and ambition, but if a human couldn’t be bothered to create and document it, I can’t be bothered to spend my time reading about it.
"Author" of os8088 here. That's unfortunate. This is a hobby, and yes, it's all written with Claude. I have a bunch of videos up showing the process. I'm updating the copy of the page to make it extremely clear that it's built using AI so that we can move past that point.
Thanks. I want to restate: I respect the idea and the ambition. I'm reacting to this feeling I get when there is a lot of text and documentation (and often code) in a thing, stated in the particular style that Claude and other agents do. It asks a lot of the reader's time, when often there is no guarantee that it is internally consistent or (as noted in some other threads here) accurate. My mind wants to work through the text and understand, but there is no guarantee that for invested time in the length of text, I will reach a coherent place.
To put it another way: if a thing is written by a human from scratch, and there is a lot of text (often not the case, because things like this are built iteratively, in the open, so they reach eyeballs before that point), I can pretty quickly ascertain whether the person knows their stuff and if it is worth my time to continue to try to reach understanding with them, to learn from the coherent vision that they have created and are trying to communicate.
Or, if they are the ramblings of a lunatic, I am hopefully able to ascertain that pretty quickly and move on.
In the case of agent-written text at this volume, it feels written to fool the reader into reaching the first case, without the guarantees of the coherent vision. Maybe that gets better with time, but for me, for now, it's enough to note with interest and move on for now.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#163It's funny how virtually everyone on HN is using AI to write code and simultaneously dismisses all interesting new software as written by AI.
For me personally there’s something deeply unsatisfying about hobby projects that are entirely AI generated. Work code is something different. I don’t have passion for a lot of that, it’s just the way I earn money. This is never going to be a commercially viable project. It’s a wonderful idea for a hobbyist passion project. But if you’re not actually coding it yourself it feels far less interesting. I can’t really ma…
The best analogy I've seen for this is: maybe you'll make a robot do housework for you, but would you make a robot go to the gym for you?
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way? It looks much closer to real human-written Asm than compiler output, which is itself a big win. No stupid calling conventions or obvious bloat. The unmistakably bloated inefficiency of "compiler slop" (that term wasn't used at the time, but those who lived through that Asm vs HLL era on the PC will know exactly what I'm talking about) is not present. I can always spot immediate optimisation opportunities…
Random inconsistencies such as using push/pop for individual registers instead of pusha/popa for space constrained bits or setting the same register to the same value twice in a row. Not to even mention that random WORDS are capitalized for some REASON as well.
pusha/popa for space constrained bits
Those instructions were introduced in the '186/8 but this project targets the 8086/8088.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#165If you want to try the operating system in the browser, you can try it by visiting here: https://os8088.com/demo/
thanks for this, such fun!
i'm going to try an run it from free bios rom space on a NuXT similar to Basic in rom:
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#166This looked great, I started reading things, and then I just kept reading and reading the voluminous description details, and it was an immediate indication to me that the whole thing was built up by Claude. Confirmed in the repo. I closed the tab. I appreciate the topic, interest, and ambition, but if a human couldn’t be bothered to create and document it, I can’t be bothered to spend my time reading about it.
"Author" of os8088 here. That's unfortunate. This is a hobby, and yes, it's all written with Claude. I have a bunch of videos up showing the process. I'm updating the copy of the page to make it extremely clear that it's built using AI so that we can move past that point.
Don't give the haters any attention. Let them complain all they want, you're the one having fun and they're not.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#167I mean this is cool, it's wholly / mostly AI gen, so it takes the wow away which I think is what foklks are reacting strongly to here. Sadly this sort of thing is much easier now - thanks to the tooling. I speak from personal experience, I'd written some stub 32bit os' myself (by hand, pre-ai) and it is very fun. But you quickly run into walls that stop further development that aren't fun. I enjoyed poking at VGA reg…
it's wholly / mostly AI gen, so it takes the wow away
No? It's the exact opposite for me. This is a great demo of how AI can do efficient software if you prompt it the right way.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author of the AI written os8088 OS here... Thanks for sharing the promotional video for Visi On. It's cool to see how many different companies gave this a shot back in the 80s.
> Author of the AI written os8088 OS here... I'm curious about your goal in purchasing this project. You don't get any peer recognition. You don't gain any special skill. You can't copyright it. You can't sell it. You can't use it for anything useful. You can't use it as a learning exercise. It can't really be built on. It can't serve as a tutorial for others to learn. You don't get the satisfaction of a job well don…
The worst part of this, is that projects that present themselves like this, poison the pool for everyone else. I imagine that many people are now disinclined to ever publish a hand-coded project in this genre (retro-computing), because people might assume that this was a trivial project (e.g. what are you so proud of, my baby 12-year-old nephew did something similar two weekends ago, just by yapping at his phone, while waiting for level-loading-screen to finish).
The Haiku project (an OS based on BeOS), is a remarkable achievement. It is sad that we may never see such things again, because people want their achievements to mean something, and, increasingly, intellectual achievements are becoming (unjustly and misleadingly) trivialized by the LLM hype machine.
It feels like humanity is deliberately making itself colorblind.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#169> The graphical operating system that could have been for the IBM XT Visi On[1] was a graphical operating system for the IBM PC that actually existed as a commercial product, though definitely not a very successful one. It was made by VisiCorp, the same company that created VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet for a personal computer). It was demoed at COMDEX in 1982, before the Apple Lisa was released. It came out after…
There was also DesQView/X, an X Windows server for DOS.
Re: Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve got nothing against AI-written code But if people are going to post it on HN, they should consider at least writing the README / main page of their website by hand It is nice to hear the human authorial voice, at least sometimes
I agree. We've just been spending more time on the operating system than the homepage. I'm making some updates, but it's still all going to be written "through" AI for now.
Why, are you incapable of writing three paragraphs of text to present your work?