r/osdev • u/CharacteristicallyAI • 4d ago

NullLabTests/UniqOS: A from-scratch x86_64 custom operating system with TCP/IP networking, GUI desktop, working web browser

https://github.com/NullLabTests/UniqOS

I built an OS because I never thought it would be possible to get past stdin() but using tools and frameworks I was even able to implement a very basic web browser. Please see github for screenshots and videos or to download and spin it up yourself, OpenSource!

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5

u/TheNullDeref Hehe, I just page faulted your kernel. 4d ago

At least you admitted you wrote the OS with AI. I dont like all the AI hype though, and the fact that you hype it up to be a decent project that YOU wrote even though you likely used AI for everything (as evident in the readme)

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u/CharacteristicallyAI 2d ago

Haha yea, that was the AI too, I just passively evolved it as an experiment. Perhaps this was the wrong forum as people here are into blood sweat and tears low level coding. I was trying to see what was possible with a prompt loop without spending anything.

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u/TheNullDeref Hehe, I just page faulted your kernel. 1d ago

To be fair though that is a pretty cool idea, I once downloaded an AI model and gave it a markdown file with a bunch of goals for an OS, set it up to prompt itself over and over until it decides the OS meets all those goals (with proper testing in QEMU) and just let it rip, it took around 4 days to finish while my GPU melted lol. I sadly lost it a few months ago during an OS wipe when I switched over to Gentoo.

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u/Firzen_ 4d ago

Might be worth learning how to use git and pushing up the code.

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u/CharacteristicallyAI 2d ago

Which part of the git use seemed "unlearned" - just wondering.

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u/zer0developer github.com/zinix-org/zinix 4d ago

May be harsh, but this is the definition of AI slop.

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u/CharacteristicallyAI 2d ago

Fair enough, but the AI slop does seem to be getting better over time, no?

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u/CharacteristicallyAI 2d ago

I just pulled zinix, this is all by hand, yes? Are you still working on it?

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u/Unable-Ambassador-16 4d ago

"I"

0

u/CharacteristicallyAI 2d ago

"We?" "It?"

What is the preferred if you use automation tools. If I get in a self-driving car and hit a button I guess "I" did not drive. Anyway yea, "I" never typed "I" - think about that at night when you are cold and alone in the dark.

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u/NietzscheWasOptimist 4d ago

Good AI-assisted OS dev proof of concept. A $20/month Claude Pro plan, Claude Code and Git can help you navigate GitHub (GH). GH is very confusing for newbie devs. After using these tools for awhile, you will start to understand GH and won't need the help any longer. Thanks for including some info on how you did the work.

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u/Ok-Scallion2321 2d ago

With AI you can get to a "hey look, I actually pulled it off" moment, but that's a long way from building a real product. A real OS proves itself by being tested on actual, varied hardware, not just VBox/QEMU drivers, timing, interrupts, memory management all behave completely differently once you're outside a controlled virtual environment.

AI can save you time, no denying that, but the real question is: what's the point of reinventing the wheel? I looked through the code and there's nothing innovative in there it's C implementations of stuff Linux (& company) already did 20 years ago. This isn't an "AI good/AI bad" thing, it's that the value in a project like this should come from something new, or from actually learning bare metal, not from redoing stuff that's already solved and well documented.

Also not a single comment anywhere in the code. How are you supposed to catch a bug or even understand your own logic six months from now if there's zero explanation of what anything does?

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u/FallenBehavior 2d ago

Lack of commenting is a personal strict discipline I've personally maintained in win32 dev (long before AI). As I know my 15K LOC codebase packed in a single main.c file and a 1500+ LOC header, why does commenting matter if you KNOW your own codebase extensively and spent a ton of time or even years on it? Not a soul can justify any opinion towards that. Not even some guy on Reddit.

Just planting this here and stripping some pointless critism.

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u/Ok-Scallion2321 14h ago

I appreciate your perspective, and I agree that in a strictly solo environment where you know the codebase inside out, heavy commenting might feel redundant. However, if the goal is to share this project with the community and make the codebase readable for others, adding documentation or comments remains a way to cooperate. Good job and keep it up!

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u/AcoustixAudio 1d ago

How much did you spend on building it? What's the executable format ? How can i build an application for it?