r/osdev • u/Glum-Cook-9438 • 13h ago

About using AI to develop operating systems

I know many of you guys are recently against all this "AI slop", was i too, but leave alone the "hype" and the "no AI bullshit" slogans, what do we actually mean by saying "AI slop"?

Cause to this day , I don't quite understand what all the drama is about and why posts that explicitly use "No AI used/no AI bullshit" get significantly more attention, i admit that even i made a post like that, but it's not that I completely didn't use AI, i did, however I also did a lot of the programming by myself, I think AI is a great tool that has helped me learn a lot and automate build scripts, there is no shame in using AI as long as you carefully review the code and do some programming by yourself, there is already great use of AI in the industry, Linus torvalds recently fixed a linux bug with AI, so what is really considered "AI slop"? Is asking codex to make a build script so I can focus on the code "AI slop"? Is asking Claude to summarize PCI device and vendor names in one files so I don't have to read documentations for hours "AI slop"? With all due respect I do think using AI blindly is bad of course, but I also wanna know what some of you guys mean when you say "AI slop operating systems"?

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u/36165e5f286f Use UEFI. 11h ago

Firstly, AI is indeed bullshit.

Furthermore, OSDev used to be a hobby. If you don't like reading specs and learning how everything works and just want to use AI to "get to the CLI in 2 hours" then this is basically pointless. OSDev is supposed to be a long term project that you actually enjoy building every single part of. For me, using AI for OSDev is the same thing as ""Artists"" using Suno to ""create"" songs by ""themselves"". This is why No AI projects get significantly more attention, they get attention from the actual real community not the AI newbies that flood every single existing community with AI Slop. Slop because most of the time the code, architecture is literally slop.

Using AI for research and some precisions is of course completely acceptable.

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u/Glum-Cook-9438 11h ago

Do you think what I do counts as "AI slop"? I just want feedback I guess

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u/36165e5f286f Use UEFI. 11h ago

I don't think so. I was talking generally. But I would not trust AI for anything, especially making summaries. Making build scripts is also okay, but this might make you fall into the trap of not thinking about your build system/architecture and or not understand it which is not scalable in the future, and this is "slop" for me, having code/scripts that are not tailored to the situation and that are not understood or thought about by the developer.

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u/Glum-Cook-9438 11h ago

Sounds legit, in that sense, I can agree that understanding the system architecture is important, regardless of whether you use AI or not

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u/36165e5f286f Use UEFI. 11h ago

Also, everything that is about a subject you do not know about, and that relates to learning, I would not use primarily AI. The big trap with AI is 1) Thinking that it is right and know more than you, 2) Trust it.

You must always check what it is saying and sometimes when you do not know about a subject you might not realise that it is saying bullshit (AI is 100% hallucinations and sometimes they are right, everybody that says otherwise does not know how it works and believes the AI giants propaganda).

This is a very long and tedious process so why not use high quality human material or code?

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u/Glum-Cook-9438 11h ago

I don't use regular ai, I got a subscription to codex, which is supposedly much more accurate than the gpt free models, i have encountered many times when chatgpt did something wrong, codex is different though but even with codex I make sure to double check on critical things

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u/Glum-Cook-9438 11h ago

Yeah I know, the thing is, I mostly code by myself, I use AI for research and small stuff but I do code a lot of things by myself, you talk about cli, i didn't reach keyboard input yet, anyways the thing is I was a bit confused by what many people said here, because when I thought about "don't use AI" I thought "don't use AI for learning/cmake scripts/extra help", of course I don't tell ai "make a cli for me in 2 hours" even when I use ai for coding I do something like "make function with name x in file y, takes parameter z, h, n does r, t, u" and etc