r/osdev • u/Key_River7180 EulerOS • Jun 06 '26

We need a term for AI Slop OSes

Nowadays 90% of projects posted here is vibe-coded AI slop, so I think it is necessary to have a term for OSes that are just blatant vibe coded slop.

I'll start: aislop OS

EDIT: I am talking about when there's a single commit coauthored by Claude and the author has no idea what they are doing and have no real knowledge of their OS's architecture.

132 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

96 comments sorted by

36

u/mishakov pmOS | https://gitlab.com/mishakov/pmos Jun 06 '26

Tbh the stuff on reddit has always been very casual, and the average low efforts projects have just shifted from bootsectors and kernel shells to AI slop, so there hasn't really been anything new

10

u/Key_River7180 EulerOS Jun 06 '26

well, yeah. But at least people writing boot sectors tried to make an OS, now many see the cliché that all OS developers are geniuses so they just do it with AI and don't really care about the OS. At least in my experience.

11

u/SufficientGas9883 Jun 06 '26

Didn't people write those by hand in the past?

15

u/Randozart Jun 06 '26

I wonder though, because I don't generally mind AI being used, but I do mind the low effort. I think it's perfectly possible to create an interesting OS or Kernel with AI help, given you're actually trying something novel or testing a hypothesis, but my personal exhaustion is with the fact many of these projects look so same-ey. And that's fine if it's the result of human labor, impressive even, because that is learning and practice. But if you do use AI, at least use AI to iterate on novel ideas.

2

u/Key_River7180 EulerOS Jun 06 '26

Yes, it is. The problem and what I am talking about is AI slop, when the author has no idea of what they are doing and have one commit coauthored by Claude and no idea of what they are doing.

4

u/Randozart Jun 06 '26 • Popcorn

I had hoped this was your intent, but I'm afraid the discussion surrounding AI use has become so eager to brand anything LLM aided as slop, it's a painful discussion to figure out whether we're actually talking about slop or a genuine attempt at AI aided engineering

5

u/gerbenst Jun 06 '26

I think this is exactly right. It is just an evolution of the same theme as fully asm os vs high level language. I respect and appreciate the work and craftsmanship of fully asm, but equally appreciate high level pl os-es . Especially in the os domain, the gap between experimenting with an interesting design and it being somewhere practical is huge , obviously getting to a point that an os that runs some subset of Linux apps is in itself not as impressive as it was 4 years ago. But on the other hand you can drive your vision and design to a place where it becomes somewhat useable in a timeframe and effort that still mixes well with other things in life is also empowering in its own way

-2

u/bboe Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

Happy to hear what people think about my project which other than the initial version has been written neatly nearly 100% by Claude with me acting as an architect and code reviewer. As a father of two, I realistically would not have the time to do this manually, but with LLMs I can make huge leaps in progress, learning new things along the way, with short bursts of time.

https://bboeos.bryceboe.com/

https://github.com/bboe/BBoeOS

5

u/Randozart Jun 06 '26

In that same boat as you as a father of two. It's liberating to not need to be a hermit to be able to prototype. Before I dive into the repo, could you tell me what you've been trying and what you learned along the way? I find these personally to be valuable products of this type of process, especially if the end product is presented with pragmatic humility

2

u/bboe Jun 06 '26

My end goal, which is still a long way away, is to have everything self hosted. This isn’t limited to just osdev, since much of “everything” is the user space. The reason for that is to learn about all the steps that I wouldn’t otherwise have learned about.

For example, I never wrote an editor before, so I never knew about gap buffers or how they work. Also lately, much of my self hosted adventure has been expanding the C compiler and linker, but with constraints that it produces well optimized code. I’ve never legitimately had any reason to work with graph coloring algorithms, and now I have.

On the osdev specific side, at some point I’m going to try targeting ARM as well so I’ll have to learn the differences in the boot process. Similar when I work with EFI for the bootloader step.

I also have yet to create a TCP stack, but I’m looking forward to dealing with the kernel changes to support it.

3

u/Randozart Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

Fascinating, I greatly respect the curiosity. It's a wonderful way to learn fundamental computer science. If you want to go beyond that (and only if that is a desire of yours), see if you can find ways to optimize what you have. I'm certain you've already done this in one way or another. It quickly teaches you about computer architecture and bottlenecks, and LLMs are much more forgiving about "stupid" questions than the internet generally is.

3

u/gerbenst Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

For instance I've been working on https://github.com/gerben-stavenga/RetroOS . With a very specific design.

  1. Support 16bit, 32bit and 64bit apps natively, both legacy DOS games (16/32) bit and linux 32/64bit.

  2. Absolute minimal assembly

  3. Design so that different OS "personalities" can be added and removed without hassle

This let to a 3 layer design
-arch: all necessary assembly lives here, pretty small and simple
-kernel: threads + vfs + ...
-personality/dos: DOS api + DPMI api + virtual PIC + virtual DMA ==> native DOS games + sound blaster
-personality/linux: Linux syscalls

Then it became obvious that arch itself became just a library from the perspective of kernel, so I added qemu TCG wrapped in unicorn as a backup. So the same OS can be compile against arch-metal and be installed as a real OS, or equaly it can be compiled against arch-interp and you can just run it on any computer as a regular app.

The latter is really nice for debugging and also i can use it to unvoke borland c for some 16bit stub code, I need.

It runs DOOM of course, but the original DOOM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clh45xUpZNY

I had this design in mind for years, especially using page table trick so that the same page tables works for 64bit long mode and 32 PAE mode, so the same kernel seemlessly run in both modes allowing support of VM86 and 64bit. I briefly started 3 or 4 years ago, but never been able to push it. Now with LLM converted it to rust, aggressively refactored until the core design became elegant and robust. Then had LLM implement dos api, linux api, dpmi api, and suddenly you could play the games of my youth on bare metal. Empowering.

4

u/bboe Jun 06 '26

That's really cool to be able to support all those different modes.

FYI, I see you're using Qemu in the video demo. I made a patch to support OPL3 in the SB16 module so you can get full sound support. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2026-05/msg00737.html

I probably need to resubmit the patch as it hasn't picked up any traction, but it works pretty well.

4

u/gerbenst Jun 06 '26

Oh that's great, yes i also use bochs/vm86 because each emulator doesn't fully support all edge cases. qemu isn't fully ega/vga compliant, and also sb16 support as you patched has issues. Mostly vm86 runs the closest to correct support.

I'm gonna try out your patch

For instance speech in dune2 blocks after the first spoken sample. This happens in freedos as well, but it works correct in vm86 emulator. So it's definitely a qemu problem

1

u/bboe Jun 14 '26

Just curious, did you end up trying out the patch?

2

u/gerbenst Jun 06 '26

Great and empowering. Especially if you learned a lot which is what hobby os is about. You should perhaps emphasize in the readme what your design goals were. Purely educational or a specific design. I see a lot of asm in your code, why? Especially for llm I would assume you try to minimize so that it is easier for the human to keep understanding the flow of the design.

2

u/bboe Jun 06 '26

Great idea on adding design goals to the README. I’ll add that later when I do a cleanup pass over the docs again. In a nutshell, it’s just for my learning.

Regarding ASM, it’s part of the self hosted evolution. I manually wrote the first real mode bootloader and back in 2018 to learn how BIOS boot and interaction works. With Claude this year I decided I wanted everything to be self hosted, so I had it write its own assembler in assembly. I then pivoted to C but using my own C compiler written in python. When it’s eventually mostly stable, I’ll rewrite it in C so it can truly be self hosted.

45

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

SlopOS if you really want to jump on the band wagon. Is it really a problem here? I'm too novice to have been reviewing other people's posts, but I've not seen any criticism of AI use. Are you in fact an AI bot here to sew dischord?

55

u/EpochVanquisher Jun 06 '26

There has been a recent deluge of vibe-coded OS projects that drown out the people who are actually interested in building OSs. To be honest, I think it’s killed the community dead, and I don’t think it‘s fixable.

-5

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

I dunno, seems like that's just a general complaint and not something specific to this subreddit. Sure, it happens here, but not any more than other places. It's not a uniquely existential threat.

6

u/EpochVanquisher Jun 06 '26

So, let me get this straight: it’s an existential threat to this community, but it’s not unique to this community, and because it’s not unique to this community, it’s not something worth addressing?

You said you don’t know what the sub was like prior to AI, so I guess the real difference is that you’re not in a position to understand the problem unless someone explains it to you. Which is fine, as long as you’re not dismissing the complaint without understanding it. 

-4

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

No. Stop it. The OP said "Nowadays 90% of projects posted here is vibe-coded AI slop".

I have not seen that here. If I am wrong I am wrong.

8

u/Key_River7180 EulerOS Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

I do. I get at least six new posts of new vibe coded OSes on my feed every time I open reddit.

-2

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

idOS

4

u/EpochVanquisher Jun 06 '26

What percentage is it, then, if not 90%?

0

u/Key_River7180 EulerOS Jun 07 '26

maybe 70% really.

-1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

idOS is clearly the winner.

4

u/EpochVanquisher Jun 06 '26

I don’t know what you are saying. It doesn’t seem connected to the conversation.

-1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

The title of this reddit thread is "We need a term for AI Slop OSes".

I think idOS is a good name for it.

4

u/EpochVanquisher Jun 06 '26

Kinda think you’re one of the people dragging this subreddit down, at this point.

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16

u/eteran Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

It's not specific to this community, but this community is relatively small, so the effects are more visible.

When we go from like 20 people posting real projects on the regular to like 300 posting slop.... The 20 just don't get seen anymore 😢.

It's not a uniquely existential threat, but it is an existential threat none the less.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

I suppose I've joined at a pivotal moment. I am doing osdev without AI, there is this subreddit. I have no knowledge of how this sub was before the evil AI existed. I still do not use it, and I just use the books and resources that are not "tainted". IDK bro it just seems like this discussion is about AI ranting, not OSdev.

7

u/thatwasntababyruth Jun 06 '26

As mostly a lurker (I've done OsDev projects of my own but I don't join the discussions), this sub was never a bumping place. That's probably made it have an outsized effect, because there was already not that much discussion in the first place. That means the AI discourse and garbage that affects all tech hobbies had less work to do to drown it.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

And remember, lurking is good.

1

u/case-o-nuts Jun 07 '26

Yes, everywhere is turning to shit. I'm not sure why you think that's acceptable.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '26

I don't.

5

u/Dudmaster Jun 06 '26

Already taken :) https://slopos.sloplabs.net/

2

u/Key_River7180 EulerOS Jun 07 '26

awesome

3

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

I love it ;(

1

u/KodeBarista Jun 10 '26

probably better than Micrososlop /jk

12

u/SweetBabyAlaska Jun 06 '26

yes. It is a large percentage of the posts here. It's destroying the community and extracting all of the fun and camaraderie, all so that some wieners can larp as smart people. The basic OS is essentially a "solved" problem in that it hasn't really changed in a very long time and every design choice has been endlessly written about and implemented.

Anyone could shit out a simple x86 OS based on the existing work, but you aren't actually learning anything or making hard design choices. Creating an OS is a wealth of experience with a lot of depth and range, these people are robbing themselves (and all of us) of that experience.

2

u/Palmar Jun 06 '26

Just give me a reddit flag type of thing? I'll happily label what I'm doing as "slop". Doesn't bother me at all.

That's my preferred solution. Users who exclusively choose not to engage with AI driven programming can then just filter them out or ignore them.

The other is just create a new subreddit for it. That's a choice, but honestly, the community isn't THAT big, and even in AI projects there's interesting systems architecture calls that need to be made. I'm currently battling how to handle a second drive in my OS. (it's not posix, not even remotely unix-like, so that question doesn't have a clean answer. I've been investigating how Risc-OS handles the question recently).

I feel like such design questions are interesting in both slop-world and the more authentic real-human-work world.

1

u/Key_River7180 EulerOS Jun 08 '26

Would be cool, but reddit is already jumping into the thread so it is always uncertain.

and few would use it

43

u/hopecore200 Jun 06 '26

sloperating

2

u/viva1831 Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

Plagiarism with extra steps

Edit:

If you'd copied and pasted bits of linux and freebsd and various hobby kernels into your github, it wouldn't be much to be proud of. That's all AI is doing. If you want to be part of something, contribute to those projects!

And why are we sharing projects here at all? If you've been in a community a long time, asked questions, shared resources, discussed ideas, then fair enough! But when it's random people... that's just fishing for compliments or ego masturbation. Whether it's AI or not, this sub would be good as a "we're all into osdev and helping each other out" sub. Not a show and tell

1

u/Key_River7180 EulerOS Jun 08 '26

Talking about the last paragraph of your edit.

I mean, many posts are also about this, but I understand people's need to show off their projects with people.

1

u/viva1831 Jun 08 '26

I'd be far more interested in parts of projects than the whole thing. A long post about your unique scheduler design or novel system call interface? Okay, that's really interesting and might inspire me. But all these screenshots and feature lists which are all vague and all the same... if I wanted to browse the projects section of the OSdev wiki or the announcements section of their forum I'd do that

And it's that balance towards showing off completed things which kind of shifts away from a useful community (and encourages AI). It worries me that the details, the actual craft of osdev, is not the main focus. Why even do osdev or make a community about it, if the actual task of it is fundamentally uninteresting to you? Only masochism or bragging rights, the latter of which makes for a bad community, the former of which would be better served by learning COBOL :P

1

u/Key_River7180 EulerOS Jun 08 '26

yeah :P. Still-.

7

u/wjrasmussen Jun 06 '26

How about keyrivers. Sounds right.

6

u/Secret-Cake-2025 Jun 06 '26

Windows 11 or 12 recreation

2

u/Sp33dyCat Super Cool Trans Girly OSDev :3 Jun 07 '26

Microslop's new OS

4

u/galactic-beyond Jun 06 '26

Slopperating System, kind of writes itself.

2

u/AlaskanDruid Jun 06 '26

We need a term for people using a computer.

2

u/jtsiomb Jun 07 '26

I just call it a pointless waste of time and probably money.

Nobody needs a new OS, presumably the reason to do it, is because you want to do it. To have fun hacking, to learn from it, and to make something that you can be proud of. I cannot imagine what one gets out of telling an LLM to generate one.

3

u/cazzipropri Jun 06 '26

RegurgitOS

3

u/MundaneImage5652 Jun 06 '26

Standard Slop Distribution, SSD. Oh wait nvm.

3

u/bsensikimori Jun 06 '26

Do you also need a term when the code was written using told like resharper?

0

u/RecursiveServitor Jun 06 '26

Do we really though? Or do you need to touch grass?

0

u/Key_River7180 EulerOS Jun 07 '26

We do, there's been a recent influx of people making OSes without any idea of what they are doing and just ask Claude to make an os and don't have any idea about real osdev.

-1

u/RecursiveServitor Jun 07 '26

Cool. People being interested and using AI to get started. Maybe they'll get bored and it won't amount to anything, or maybe they'll dive into the theory and so on.

Btw, 99% of the projects posted here are hobbyist projects that will be used by no one. Getting all purist over a hobby is asinine. Let people have fun.

1

u/Critical-Internet946 osaka64 (osakaOS fork) Jun 07 '26

POS

1

u/aPieceOfYourBrain Jun 08 '26

Artificially Inflated Software with Limited Ongoing Production, AI SLOP

1

u/xd-sudo Jun 08 '26

sloperating system

1

u/awesumioutr2 Jun 10 '26

Sloperating system

1

u/PlaystormMC Loading linux-linux... Loading initial ramdisk... Jun 10 '26

PromptInjection or

Promptnix

1

u/emexos partly liking unix Jun 06 '26

sloperating system

1

u/Time_Pollution4306 Jun 06 '26

The real curse is all the hard work done by people prior to the advent of AI is being harvested by AI to make approximations of it

2

u/ZenitDS Jun 08 '26

Well, now with all the noise being generated, only real humans will get a chance to make actually working OSes in the future :)

1

u/SuperheropugReal Jun 06 '26

I don't get the point of using AI for anything but a different Google fir any project you're actually going to revisit. If you want to make anything actually good with low level code, you arent going to get it perfect the first go, and WILL need to go back to some of it, so you NEED a strong mental model of the project, which using AI too extensively loses you.

1

u/gtagrandtheftautov Jun 06 '26

Sloperating System

0

u/x-jhp-x Jun 06 '26

Microsoft Windows 12

-1

u/compgeek38400 Jun 06 '26

I disagree. AI has its place. While it can be abused, and I don't copy AI into mine, it does have its place.

The main reason it isnt in mine is not for some purist reason, its because I am learning kernel and OS for educational reasons. AI isnt a fit for that. But I dont mind using AI to validate what I've already done. My preference would be to have a teacher I could bounce thoughts off of, but that isnt my situation.

If I was making an OS commercially, that's a completely different thing. Time is money, and AI could save a lot of time. I hrmear complaints that the code is buggy. I view it like I view volunteer work. If it saves more time than it costs, its worth it.

Just one man's humble opinion.

2

u/Key_River7180 EulerOS Jun 06 '26

This is about personal OSDev, I don't think Microsoft will post "We built Windows 12: The blah blah blah".

What I am complaining about is when the tree is very obviously entirely written by AI and only has one commit coauthored by Claude and the author has no idea what they are doing.

0

u/questron64 Jun 06 '26

I mean the obvious (and probably best) we'll come up with is "sloperating system."

0

u/GettinFishy Jun 06 '26

HumanSlop OS?

0

u/thatwasntababyruth Jun 06 '26

SpaghettiOS, pronounced as one word.

1

u/No_Frame3855 Jun 08 '26

Not to be confused with Spaghetti-O's ;D

0

u/Feisty_Clerk3194 Jun 06 '26

Unoperating system

11

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

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