Summary
- Vib-OS, a vibe-coded OS, boots to a macOS-like desktop, an impressive feat for AI-generated code.
- It can handle a note app, a GUI, and a clumsy Snake game, but networking, Doom, and file ops fail.
- Its bugs are surreal—the mouse can ‘eat’ apps, and the note app rebuilds its own UI under the cursor.
How in-depth do you think a vibe-coded app can go in terms of features and complexity? Depending on who you’d ask, you’d likely get different replies. Fans of AI programming will likely predict that programmers will end up more as AI wranglers than coders, while critics will point to vibe coding’s high bugginess rate and lack of security measures.
Well, regardless of what your stance on vibe coding is, you have to agree that getting an entire operating system running off the coding practice is pretty impressive. Such is the case of Vib-OS, an entire operating system created using AI. Is the operating system any good? Well, no. But the key thing is that it does boot, and that’s good enough for me. Well, okay, maybe the ability to connect to the internet would have also been nice.
I turned my phone into a Linux desktop with this free app
It’s basically Linux running inside an app, with a desktop environment, too.
Vib-OS is a vibe-coded operating system that may have vibed a little too hard
But it can boot, so there’s that
As spotted by Hackaday, YouTuber Tirimid decided to give the AI-generated Vib-OS a try. As per its GitHub, Vib-OS sounds like a promising project:
Vib-OS is a from-scratch, Unix-like operating system with full multi-architecture support for ARM64 and x86_64. It features a custom kernel, a modern macOS-inspired graphical user interface, a full TCP/IP networking stack, and a Virtual File System (VFS). Built with 25,000+ lines of C and Assembly, it runs natively on QEMU, real hardware (Raspberry Pi 4/5, x86_64 PCs), and Apple Silicon.
It sounds a little too good to be true, so Tirimid decided to check it out for themselves. To better decide if Vib-OS is worthy of your time, Tirimid put the operating system through a few tests as a checklist of things they expect from an OS. The first one was that the OS has to actually boot up, and to my surprise, an entirely vibe-coded OS can boot to the desktop. Pretty impressive stuff.
Unfortunately, that’s seemingly where the wonders end. The only other tests Vib-OS managed to pass were hosting a functional note-taking app, handling a GUI, and running Snake (albeit poorly). Everything else, from connecting to the internet to playing the pre-included copy of Doom in the OS’s files to deleting files, all failed.
As you might imagine, the vibe-coded OS came with some pretty amazing bugs. For instance, if you open an app using its dedicated Function key shortcut, your mouse will begin ‘eating’ the app when you move your cursor over it, unless you open the note-taking app, which actually begins to rebuild the parts you hover over.
