// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
What Even Is an OS Now?
Crazy as it sounds to say this, since it’s all anybody’s been able to talk about for over a year, but the impact of AI on computing hasn’t yet sunk in.
Today I’m parting company with Fly.io to work with Kurt on a new project. I’m getting that out of the way so you all know up front I’m talking my book.
When I was a little kid, a family friend sold us our first “computer” — scare quotes because I’m pretty sure it was a VTech Laser 200 clone, a chiclet keyboard Z80 that ran off cassette tapes and plugged into our TV. I was old enough to know what a computer was, and conceptually what it meant to program one, because I remember dreaming of all the dumb games I could make. Finally! We had a device that would allow me to make things like the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” text adventure I’d play at my dad’s office.
But it booted straight into BASIC. That’s all it did. I was, like, 8 years old. I wasn’t about to learn BASIC. What I learned instead: computers were not as awesome as I’d imagined.
By my mid-teens, computer security finally dragged me into programming. Coding only reinforced that crummy lesson. The more I understood how programs were constructed, the more forbidding it sounded to build an entire complicated application. I could belt out fast network servers no problem, but a word processor? You might as well have asked me to build a diesel locomotive.
Suddenly, everything has changed. Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8.
I’ve been writing these past several months about all the native macOS apps I’ve been churning out, and how weird it is to watch AI dissolve the boundaries between backend programming and frontend, between web and native, systems and applications. All huge stories; any one of them would land in my career top 10 big shifts.
But AI is knocking down a much more important boundary: the one between programmers and users. My Mac menu bar and task switcher are cluttered with icons for programs I conjured for myself, with English as my programming language.
What I did on my computer, any power user can do on theirs.
That’s a statement about the reality; a “prediction”, if you want a concession to your skepticism about AI, but only in the sense that I can predict that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. So what do you do with that?