Last year, OpenAI cofounder and former exec Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding,” a new approach involving the rapid development of software by feeding an AI model a series of natural language prompts.
But the popular approach comes with some glaring shortcomings, as evidenced in an entirely vibe-coded operating system, dubbed Vib-OS. The project, which is being hosted on GitHub, can be run on ARM64 and x86-based computers, features a “custom kernel,” a “modern macOS-inspired graphical user interface,” and a “virtual file system.”
And yes, in case you were wondering, the project claims in its possibly AI-generated documentation that you can play Doom on it.
But as a YouTuber who goes by Tirimid discovered in a recent video, the operating system, at least in its current state, is a buggy and largely unusable mess, once again highlighting the limitations of relying on vibe-coding to quickly construct complex pieces of software.
The iconic demon-slaying shooter Doom also appears to be conspicuously absent. A launcher icon for the iconic game didn’t react at all to Tirimid’s enthusiastic mouse clicks, suggesting the AI may have hallucinated the feature altogether.
The YouTuber spent several hours agonizingly going through the operating system’s purported features, and found that it failed to connect to the internet, buttons in the File Manager didn’t respond to clicks, the Notepad app refused to save any documents, and games, such as the dumb phone era classic Snake, didn’t work very well at all.
An app labeled “Browser,” incredibly, turned out to be an image viewer, not a web browser that can render websites.
Despite the documentation noting that the OS was capable of running Python scripts, Tirimid was also disappointed to find there was no support for the programming language.
“I really found this operating system interesting,” he concluded in his video. “It was quite an absolute pain to set up to really get everything going, but once I did, it was just kind of shocking in a way. I really expected this to actually be at least reasonably usable.”
“This is actually a pretty featureless operating system,” he added. “Although I guess it is still interesting that AI can get an operating system running at all.”
Netizens were amused by the YouTuber’s experience.
“You found an early build of Windows 12,” one commenter wrote, referring to Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to control the narrative following the massive blowback to its insistence on AI.
In a follow-up note he posted in the comments of his video, Tirimid begged others not to harass the creators of Vib-OS.
“I was somewhat negative about many parts of this OS, but please don’t go to the repo and be negative in the issues or whatever,” he wrote.
Whether advancements in AI will one day allow models to build actually usable operating systems and other sophisticated software remains to be seen. But it’s certainly a future tech leaders want us to believe in, as they continue to make massive investments in AI and lay off thousands of workers.
More on vibe coding: Even Tech Investors Are Getting Sick of All These AI Startups With Weak Ideas
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