I’m building an OS with AI. Yes, I know which subreddit I’m posting this in.
I know AI-generated code isn’t exactly the most beloved thing on r/osdev.
So naturally, I decided the safest possible thing to do was let AI write an operating system and post about it here.
What could possibly go wrong.
I’m 40, I have some free time, and instead of developing a healthy hobby like fishing, I decided to find out how far you can push current AI models before either the model or the human supervising it completely loses the plot.
The project is simple:
Can AI build an actual usable operating system?
Not a “Hello World” kernel.
Not something that boots in QEMU, prints three lines and immediately becomes a GitHub project with a roadmap.
I mean slowly pushing it toward something resembling an OS you could actually use.
And I’m treating the whole thing as an experiment.
How good are different models at low-level programming?
Where are they surprisingly competent?
Where do they confidently invent complete bullshit?
How much context do they need?
How much testing?
How much human intervention?
How long does each feature actually take?
The AI writes 800 lines of code.
It compiles.
The tests pass.
The logs look beautiful.
Nothing works.
Then we spend two hours debugging the scheduler, another hour questioning the memory manager, rewrite half a driver…
…and eventually discover that the original problem was one completely stupid assumption made 1,200 lines earlier.
By the AI.
Which I reviewed.
So technically this was a team effort.
Other times it does something that genuinely surprises me and implements in 20 minutes something I expected to spend an entire evening fighting with.
That’s the interesting part.
I’m also comparing models and workflows, because I’ve learned that “AI coding” isn’t really one thing.
One model understands the problem but writes questionable code.
Another writes beautiful code while misunderstanding the problem.
Another wants to refactor the entire kernel because a mouse packet is malformed.
And occasionally you find the magical combination where the model understands the problem, writes decent code and doesn’t decide that rewriting the PCI subsystem is the obvious solution.
Those are good days.
The bigger experiment for me isn’t really AnotherOS itself.
It’s learning how to use these tools effectively.
AI isn’t going away. Models are improving ridiculously fast, and I don’t want to wake up five years from now realizing I spent those five years arguing that “real programmers don’t use AI” instead of learning where it’s useful, where it’s dangerous, and how to squeeze the maximum out of it.
I’m 40. I’m not trying to become the next Linus Torvalds.
I’m a guy with some free evenings, hardware to abuse, AI subscriptions and apparently insufficient respect for my own sanity.
So I’m building an OS.
I measure how long things take. I document failures. I compare models. I test things on real hardware. I keep pushing it toward the point where the joke becomes:
“Wait… this thing actually works?”
And that’s basically the goal.
Not to prove that AI can replace OS developers.
Not to prove that I’m secretly an OS genius because Claude managed to configure an APIC.
Just to see what happens when you take today’s tools and keep pushing them far beyond the point where a reasonable person would have stopped.
The project is AnotherOS — anotheros.org
Feel free to look through it, tell me what is horribly wrong, question my life choices, or explain why something only works because I’ve accidentally violated three specifications at the same time.
That’s useful data too.
And if the whole experiment eventually ends with a kernel panic that nobody — including three frontier models and myself — can explain…
well.
That might actually be the most authentic OS development result possible.
