The fact this even almost works remains fascinating. Someone got a full-featured bare-metal operating system to program itself, and it’s halfway between early ReactOS and that Flash game for Windows Really Good Edition.

We forget that computers are for everyone. They’re supposed to be a bicycle for the mind. Needing to rely on existing mature applications, created by teams of experts, is an obstacle we’ve been fighting since BASIC. Anyone should be able to slap together some program that suits their needs. And not just theoretically capable - able. ‘You could learn to do it!’ means you cannot yet do it.

There’s a handful of languages intuitive enough to make people dangerous in matter of days. Until recently, suggesting that English was one of them would be laughable - but now you really can describe what you want and swallow the elephant. It doesn’t work, but it’s alarmingly close, for amateur use of this fiddly tool. The computer literally did your work for you, and people still complain about limitations.

An actual intelligence trained on StackOverflow would look at ‘make me a new OS’ and respond, ‘but why do you want that instead of modifying BSD?’ An intelligence that’s also been trained to avoid backsass would start from structure and complete its own todos. Which some guy claims to have done, for compiling a new language that mostly uses stupid names for things. He’s got the right idea, for weaponizing an LLM into something useful, but that idea is to make it act like diffusion.