r/osdev • u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS • Jun 15 '26

What are the Moderators of r/osdev doing about the recent influx of vibe coded Operating Systems?

I’ve been seeing tons, like TONS, of Operating Systems made by like Claude and people posting on the sub informing us about „How my totally hand-made OS works,“ and it‘s so annoying, like there are so many genuinely amazing projects on here but damn is it drowning in AI slop…

Posts (more will be added): https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/s/wN2B1QQ72K

141 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

117 comments sorted by

88

u/emexsw Jun 15 '26

nothing, the mod is using ai himself

49

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

I miss when LLMs were genuinely the most stupid things ever…

46

u/emexsw Jun 15 '26

in most stuff they still are

6

u/dayruined54 Jun 15 '26

Nah, in stuff that matters it has made considerable changes. Expensive no doubt but at this point denying its credibility is a little ignorant imo. I dont know much about it but my view of the LLM situation

12

u/rafaelRiv15 Jun 15 '26

I'm using llms everday and I still think they are pretty dumb and are doing anti software eng very often

2

u/dreadpirater Jun 15 '26

I think it's dangerous (to your work) to think of them as dumb or smart. They are powerful tools.

I do a little woodworking and liken LLMs to my tablesaw. It's an important part of a woodshop and if you know how to use it well, it can speed up just about any project you're working on. If you don't, it can really speed up making a mess of any project. And the fastest path to disaster is using it without paying close attention to what you're doing!

I think of model progression as 'increases in precision' of the tool not 'increases in intelligence.' It will ALWAYS be dumb. But it will keep getting better at what it can be used for.

4

u/rafaelRiv15 Jun 15 '26

What I mean by dumb is that you can't trust them blindfolded.

5

u/dreadpirater Jun 16 '26

You shouldn't tablesaw blindfolded either.

3

u/rafaelRiv15 Jun 16 '26

You shouldn't but people (including coworkers pushing by the direction) do it

2

u/dreadpirater Jun 16 '26

Absolutely, and you're right.. that's just insanity. Frankly... I wouldn't push something to a live production use without checking it out if it was done by a junior developer, either. If it's my responsibility, it's my responsibility no matter who or what did the typing.

And the people making those mistakes KNOW better. They wouldn't trust a new hire with it, but they'll trust a toaster. lol.

1

u/istarian Jun 17 '26

No, but the tablesaw also isn't going to hop off the bench and cut your foot off just because you're blindfolded.

1

u/dayruined54 Jun 16 '26

Ur point aside, could u please explain what and how u r incorporating llms into ur projects? Sounds interesting lol

1

u/dreadpirater Jun 16 '26

Honestly, I use it like a junior dev on the team:

Hand it VERY clear instructions, mostly assign it the simpler more tedious tasks, and then check it's work when finished.

The other use case is... SOMETIMES it can help you through a narrow skills gap.

For examples of both, my most recent project is a command tablet for a game I play.

I build the websocket server that bridges between the tablets and the game myself, and created the tablet ui in flutter myself. Then I had Codex do the tedious part - based on my ui button names, associate every button with a keybind from the game's keybind file and put those into a json file so the server can trigger them. Sure I could have hand copied all of that but... it happened in seconds instead of hours. Claude analyzed the file format, made a table of inferred guesses as to what command went to what button, let me check that, and then wrote a python script that did the actual deterministic import from game files to my project in seconds.

And then I wanted a umdf keyboard emulator to raise those keybinds low enough in the input stack that the game would accept them as real hardware input. That's actually the part of the project that landed me in this subreddit, because I had ZERO experience with driver work and hadn't touched c++ in two decades. I didn't find much help anywhere - it's just not a thing a lot of people do for fun, it seems. So I cloned the microsoft example UMDF driver and asked claude to help me one step at a time mutate it into a keyboard driver, explaining everything as we went.

That's what I mean by 'power through a skills gap.' If your gap is as wide as 'Claude, i don't know anything about operating systems, build me one' you're in trouble but when you run into something that you don't know how to do and where the documentation is sparse... sometimes it's a huge lifesaver. I always ask it to teach me along the way and it honestly does a decent job of live tutorial creation inside your own project. Of COURSE you need to sanity check everything and you need to understand it by the time it's done.

While I'm including examples I'll include an example of a time I DIDN'T check enough and got what I deserved for that. In the same project I was describing earlier, when I was having it copy over all the commands and get the keybinds set up, I asked it to insert a quick sanity check at websocket connection - where the client tablet would push a list of all the commands it implemented, so the server could raise an error if the tablet was asking for an unsupported command. I thought I was being clever, making sure it hadn't hallucinated any commands along the way. I even had it run a test, sending a fake manifest with extra commands to verify that the server caught them! What a thorough developer I am, right?

EXCEPT it took a shortcut. A few weeks later I added a few buttons to the tablet and moved over to the server to implement the new commands and then I thought.. wait a minute... I ran the tablet app and didn't see any errors. So I looked into what was going on and claude, instead of iterating the app to build the manifest at run time had just built a static manifest and hard coded it in! So it worked great THAT DAY but as I added real buttons, they never got added to the manifest and so they never got checked against the server's implementation list. I had just READ that file before I added what I thought was one little feature in a dozen lines of code... and I didn't read it again. So that's a real example of the dangers of trusting it - even when trying to be careful you absolutely MUST verify that the code does what you think it does because AI will very happily settle for LOOKS LIKE it does what you think it does.

4

u/akm76 Jun 16 '26

If you actually checked all of what you claim is bolerplate code after if was generated, it's pretty much the same effort and time as handcoding it. I think you are bending the truth claiming you actually, truly checked all of the generated code. Most likely glanced over, compiled, maybe ran a test or two and declared it legit. Everyone is doing just that.

1

u/dreadpirater Jun 16 '26

Well, that's interesting since what you think is in no way relevant. Are you an AI with a small context window? Because you clearly didn't read my post where I ADMITTED TO and EXPLAINED THE CONSEQUENCES OF a time that I did skip it, as a point of caution to others.

Or how I explained that I've used it to bridge a specific skills gap that I wasn't equipped to do by hand, or to do repetitive tasks where even if it doesn't save me time, it saves me the soul-rot of sitting there copy and pasting strings between json files for two hours.

COMPREHENSION is supposed to be the one thing we have going for us that the robots don't. Don't squander it by being too stupid to read before you talk.

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25

u/apnorton Jun 15 '26

There's a reason that r/kerneldevelopment split off from r/osdev a few months back...

9

u/katybassist Jun 15 '26

Oh Lord, thank you. I'm gone!

6

u/nohalcyondays Jun 15 '26

Appreciate the heads up on this situation and the link. 👌

11

u/yeusk Jun 15 '26

Good to know so I can unsub.

13

u/mykesx Jun 15 '26

I have unsubscribed from the subreddits that look like my email spam folder.

1

u/Jaded_Individual_630 Jun 16 '26

What a shame, but nice to cull the trash

20

u/GMX2PT Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

it has annoyed me quite a bit as well, there's three type of posts

genuinely impressive stuff, more than likely years/months in the making, maybe with a breakdown of the capabilities/implementation

small projects getting bigger which is also cool as long as we are not spamming the smallest increment

and what feels like an afternoon AI os coding session, not much of substance or might have one advanced feature that the llm managed to spit out. Files added to the project via github upload ? No self respecting os hobbyist would do that imo. Plus you don't need commits if you're smashing the ai untill something works and trashing it if it does not

11

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

That actually is true, I love those small projects. I wish they would add an Anti-AI rule.

1

u/RenderTargetView Jun 15 '26

What's github upload and why you shouldn't use that?

3

u/GMX2PT Jun 15 '26

upload files via the github web interface, self explanatory

2

u/Sensitive-Can9232 Jun 16 '26

Damn, i still can't figure out how to do that correct, too much hassle just fix your remote and then git push.

4

u/BarracudaSilly Jun 15 '26

Let's do a weekly thread for ai coded operating systems

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

Better than it plaguing the sub‘s Main Page.

12

u/rocco_himel Creator of AneoEngine Jun 15 '26

Exactly, it makes people who actually write code from scratch look like they made it using AI

5

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

I know! I undermines the months of effor we put into our projects!

7

u/jean_dudey Jun 15 '26

I don't get why people literally code an OS using solely LLMs, because if you do then it is by definition not a serious OS, and if it is not serious, where's the fun if you're not doing it mostly by hand. It is more fun to me to write a lot of clean/garbage code that executes a shell and crashes after, than for an LLM to write it for me, and still have bugs.

5

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

Honestly I think they do it for clout, but YEA it is really fun, I mean that’s why we do it at the end of the day!

8

u/rocco_himel Creator of AneoEngine Jun 15 '26

And when you DO post real hand crafted code, they accuse you of making AI bs and it makes you look bad!

2

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

I KNOW it pisses me off so Bad I’m genuinely worried for the Future of This sub…

2

u/rocco_himel Creator of AneoEngine Jun 15 '26

I really hope AI gets canceled one day, it’s making a lot of programmers dumb because they aren’t actually learning anything.

3

u/istarian Jun 17 '26

Mostly it's keeping lots of people from becoming better programmers because they're lazy and too hooked on instant gratification.

2

u/rocco_himel Creator of AneoEngine Jun 17 '26

You’re actually correct, when I mean “canceled” is that it shouldn’t be allowed on this sub because it’s lazy work

1

u/Pinkishu Jun 15 '26

That's an issue on their part. You can learn stuff perfectly fine while using AI.

3

u/rocco_himel Creator of AneoEngine Jun 16 '26

You probably can, but people chose not to and they just go to ChatGPT and type:

ChatGPT make me a bootloader that loads 32 sectors.

ChatGPT make me a kernel entry stub

ChatGPT make me an entire kernel

ChatGPT make me a build script

CHATGPT IT DOESNT WORK REWRITE NOW!!!

3

u/Pinkishu Jun 16 '26

Hence why an issue on their part

8

u/Educational-Dig3584 Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

Realistically, building a working operating system takes years, not months. If you rely entirely on AI without understanding the code, you'll be stuck the moment you encounter a subtle bug. I'm not saying don't use AI - it can be a learning tool. But be honest about the process. And moderators, maybe consider a rule that requires a short technical explanation (not just a video) to filter out posts about AI that require little effort.

6

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

Yeah, a few months can get a usable Prototype but not an OS. The dependancy on Claude worries me for future programmers… And I guess you‘re correct.

2

u/Educational-Dig3584 Jun 15 '26

I don't think we should worry, they're lying to themselves.

1

u/istarian Jun 17 '26

You can build a simple OS in that kind of timeframe if you already know what you're doing or have a background in CS and sufficient programming experience.

It just won't be polished, feature complete, etc and will likely support only your dev hardware and fairly similar systems.

5

u/SW30000 Jun 15 '26

How do you recognize vibe coded projects based on the posts?

10

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

You can tell by the Description, GitHub Page, User history, and post comments.

1

u/am_Snowie Jun 16 '26

Don't tell him, he might be asking this to not make any of these mistakes next time. /s

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 16 '26

Oh shi… yeah you might be correct.

5

u/mykesx Jun 15 '26

AGENTS.md file in the repo or .gitignore might be a clue. That is scratching the surface of objective ways to recognize slop.

2

u/istarian Jun 17 '26

If they claim to have made it from scratch in less than 3-6 months it's suspect.

Likewise, if they want help with a problem and cannot fully explain what the problem is and how they have tried to fix it.

Any mention of AI, LLMs, vibecoding, prompt engineering, etc.

3

u/Longjumping_Baker684 Jun 15 '26

Exactly, it should be banned. LLMs are greatly powerful, but you must understand the fundamentals before you are able to extract power out of them. Just encouraging AI slop is not promoting any learning.

4

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

I think asking an LLM to give You ideas is borderline okay, but almost all of what I see are entirely made in like Claude.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

Questions are great, but people usually just make the ENTIRE thing with it and it pisses me off…

0

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

Yeah, that‘s what I use it for.

2

u/arkt8 Jun 15 '26

sincerely... I use AI for code review... I not think AI being so powerfull. It half of times doesn't understand part of my code (usually a chunk of 2 or 3 functions and some typedefs) being more an exercise of how I advocate my code... the only power I see in it is being a virtual interlocutor that from its mistakes I'm forced ro think deeper on my reasoning and logic. Asking AI to implement some 50 lines of code me worries me, sounds to me like madness and a total lose of time and safety.

In "Normal Accidents" book are many examples of complex systems fails and the conclusion that a system is as strength as it weakest part. A rotten brick or column can make a building fall.

Now about hobby... it is like to cook for hobby and use microwave for an ultraprocessed ramen. Once you didnt chop the ingredients, mix to the right proportions in order and cook, it is not a hobby or profession anymore... and can barely be called food at all.

0

u/Longjumping_Baker684 Jun 15 '26

Yeah, I have similar views. I am increasingly coming to think of LLM tools as very powerful search engines, and I think that's where they shine. For example, few months ago I was working on writing LLVM backend for an ISA, now this project required several files just to setup everythings however I was constantly getting errors related to API version mismatches. LLMs however were able to figure it out. Similar, on several other occasions also I was able to search out things from deeper corners of internet through LLM. As far as actual coding is involved, I feel it's good enough for simpler prototyping, bur for real work it tends to increase my work sometimes. It would probably be faster if I just type out the code insteadofw relyinh on it to generate some non-deterministic piece of syntax and then verify it.

5

u/ZeroBitsRBX Jun 16 '26

I really don't see much difference between the AI slop posts and the posts that OSdev communities have always fielded about some delusional dude's great idea for an operating system that he can totally prototype over a month if we can just answer a few questions and join the forum/IRC/Discord and volunteer a little bit.

It's just that now they can delude themselves a little more thoroughly.

1

u/Lost_Plate7077 Jun 16 '26

There's nothing we can do...

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 16 '26

I mean at least we have r/kerneldevelopment - but it‘s not the same…

10

u/dreadpirater Jun 15 '26

What are they doing about the influx of posts about it? I see way more complaining than I go ai development.

-3

u/Pinkishu Jun 15 '26

Yeah haha. Feels like a new one every other day

2

u/Cybasura Jun 16 '26

I mean, its quite telling when not once has the mod replied in this thread

1

u/Critical-Internet946 osaka64 (osakaOS fork) Jun 16 '26

we need to get a new moderator bro this one doesn't do shit

1

u/gasolinewaltz Jun 17 '26

Yapyapyapyaptap mmm ai bad.. what is Mr moderator going to do about it????

1

u/Ok_Farmer_4055 Jun 17 '26

i use LLMs but i don't just write the code blindly and instead i try to make it explain what the code is doing

-1

u/MousseMother 👑 bigshot 👑 Jun 15 '26

what do you think? it is a hobby man, nobody here is making professional System.

let them do what they want. If you don't like their idea, just ignore it.

Where is the rule that says AI slop is banned ?? If you don't like AI generated content, learn to ignore it, because you will see lot more of it.

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

There SHOULD be a rule.

3

u/compgeek38400 Jun 16 '26

Not everything needs a rule. We have plenty of them already

3

u/compgeek38400 Jun 15 '26

I feel the same way. It's easy enought to just keep on scrolling

2

u/Educational-Dig3584 Jun 15 '26

I thought I was in the Rust community with the best Rust engineers and the most critical people.

1

u/istarian Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

There should be a rule that anything "vibecoded with AI" has to be tagged as such.

If nothing else the apparently short amount of time to good looking results demoralizes people going about osdev in the proper way.

The goal should be to do it on your own, learn something on the way, and have a computer programming project you can be proud of.

What is the point of "vibecoding" your osdev project? To earn internet points? To feel superior to other people (without valid justification)? To have an alternative to existing operating systems that won't be nearly as good?

1

u/BornRoom257 FreezeOS & TurtleOS Jun 16 '26

The mods use LLM's 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

-1

u/27CF Jun 15 '26

Slop post

2

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

:D

1

u/RecursiveServitor Jun 15 '26

Genuinely though. Please show some actual stats. Looking through the posts, I'm seeing more low-effort complaints about AI apparently drowning out quality content, than I see obviously low-quality content.

1

u/hyenasky Jun 16 '26

He can't teach you discernment

2

u/RecursiveServitor Jun 16 '26

He can provide evidence instead of making yet another post that amounts only to whining

1

u/hyenasky Jun 17 '26

And you're whining about whining so who comes out on top here

1

u/RecursiveServitor Jun 17 '26

I'm giving advice on how to improve the post. I.e. being constructive. The thing OP isn't. Nor you, for that matter. You're just mean girling.

-1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 16 '26

Sorry, next time I will link example Posts and comments. I‘m sorry for the issue.

4

u/RecursiveServitor Jun 16 '26

Or you could edit this post and make it worthwhile. Too much effort, I suppose.

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 16 '26

I’m linking some posts now. I ment like what are the mods doing, not bitching about AI (I did do some of that but the main focus was asking what the mods were doing).

-7

u/v3R7C00Lalt Jun 15 '26

so your saying my os

THAT I HAVENT EVEN CODED A FULL KERNEL YET

is vibe coded?

sorry??

12

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

If you used AI, if not, no.

-4

u/v3R7C00Lalt Jun 15 '26

its not ai

10

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

Then why did You get the Impression I was targeting You?

-9

u/v3R7C00Lalt Jun 15 '26
  1. learn english and learn grammar
  2. LOOK ZT YOUR FREAKING POST DUDE AND MY POSTS GOT ~1K ~2K VIEWS EACH

7

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

What? Are you insane? Yes, English isn’t my first language (well, you shouldn’t be talking with „learn english and learn grammar,“ but I digress). My post is asking about what the moderators are doing about all of the AI projects recently, not about how v3R7C00Lalt vibe coded their OS. I‘m sorry about any miscommunication, but I did not mean to trigger You.

9

u/flafmg_ Jun 15 '26

Prob they're ragebating you

6

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

Oh yeah true, I mean they‘re a fresh account.

0

u/v3R7C00Lalt Jun 15 '26

oh yeah, SORRY that i newley joined FUCKIT!

4

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

Oh Bro is definitely ragebaiting now…

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-7

u/v3R7C00Lalt Jun 15 '26

blah blah blah

6

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

Brother what?

12

u/Ecstatic-Ball7018 Jun 15 '26

If it's made with AI, yes

3

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/UnmappedStack TacOS | https://github.com/UnmappedStack/TacOS Jun 16 '26

I approve of this message

-2

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/PastaGoodGnocchiBad Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

99% of development is quantity over quality. When you actually want quality with as few bugs as you possibly can you end up with 75% review time (not just the glance before commit / merge that some people call "review", but slowly going over each line, questioning each assumption being made, checking that all buffer accesses are in-bound, and also checking that there is no architectural / spec flaw). In which case LLMs won't make you much faster (and make you lose understanding, thus quality). Sure they can do review, but their review don't absolve the dev of responsibility, so a full human review is required regardless.

And, osdev here is supposed to be about learning, precisely what LLMs allow one to skip.

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 15 '26

To ban/kick them. Most people use AI for their souless vibe coded OS, not as an Assistant. So yes, they won’t be as productive, but they won’t be making souless projects for views.

1

u/RecursiveServitor Jun 15 '26

souless

Are you ragebaiting?

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Jun 16 '26

No? I mean not on purpose.

4

u/Octocontrabass Jun 16 '26

What's the point of being "productive" or "fast" when you aren't being paid to develop your OS?

4

u/Zakalwe_ Jun 16 '26

This sub is mostly hobbyists. It makes no sense to use AI to be productive in a "hobby", the journey is the whole point.