Last year, Andrzej Karpathy, co-founder and former executive of OpenAI, coined the term “vibe coding,” a new approach involving rapid development of software by feeding AI models a series of natural language signals.
But the popular approach comes with some glaring drawbacks, as evidenced in a completely coded operating system, called Vibe-OS. Project, Which is being hosted on GitHubRunn on ARM64 and x86-based computers, it has 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 presumably AI-generated document that you can play Doom on it.
But as a YouTuber who goes by Tiramid Revealed in a recent videoThe 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 build complex pieces of software.
Iconic monster-slaying shooter Doom also appears to be conspicuously absent. The iconic game’s launcher icon didn’t respond at all to Tyrimid’s enthusiastic mouse clicks, which suggests the AI has completely confused the feature.
The YouTuber spent several hours deciphering the supposed features of the operating system, and found that it failed to connect to the Internet, the file manager’s buttons were not responding to clicks, the Notepad app refused to save any documents, and games like the classic Snake from the dumb phone era were not working well at all.
An app labeled “Browser” incredibly turned out to be an image viewer, not a web browser that could render websites.
Despite the documentation mentioning that the OS was capable of running Python scripts, Tiramid was also disappointed to see that there was no support for the programming language.
“I really found this operating system interesting,” he concluded in his video. “It was quite difficult to actually set it up to get everything running, but once I did, it was kind of shocking. I was really hoping it would actually be at least reasonably usable.”
“It’s really a very featureless operating system,” he said. “Although I think it’s still interesting that AI can take over an operating system.”
Netizens were amazed by the YouTuber’s experience.
“You got an early build of Windows 12,” one commenter wrote, referring to Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to control the narrative after a major push to emphasize AI.
In a follow-up note posted in the comments of his video, Tiramid urged 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 about issues or whatever,” he wrote.
Whether advances in AI will one day allow models to actually create usable operating systems and other sophisticated software remains to be seen. But this is definitely the future tech leader we want to believe in, as they continue to invest massively in AI and lay off thousands of employees.
More on Vibe Coding: Even Tech Investors Are Getting Weary of All These AI Startups With Weak Ideas
