Starling: The first real desktop written by AI | Hacker News Reader

Starling: The first real desktop written by AI

starling.build

20 pointssigna1130 comments

AI prose is great at celebrating whatever you told it to celebrate, but it always misses the most important detail: why should I care?

That was my immediate thought as well. "Ok, you built a desktop environment. Why? What can it do that can't be easily obtained elsewhere?"

If you want to say you're not like other girls and make a point of differentiating yourself from other people claiming to have made an LLM-generated desktop, the least you could do is take ten fucking minutes out of your supposed 6 month effort and write the description of what you've done yourself. When I see an obviously AI-generated website with obviously AI-generated copy, I have negative infinity reasons to believe you've put 6 months of human effort into this project. If you actually did, you're really not doing yourself any favors by not being willing to put a few minutes into presentation.

https://starling.build/why.html

Simply copy-pasting an AI-generated essay to someone criticising your complete lack of effort, thereby proving the point, is certainly a choice.

Weird, the swift port of flutter seems waaaay more interesting than the desktop itself. Was it just the dart code of flutter ported or the runtime too?

/edit Nevermind 'just' dart: https://github.com/starling-build/starling-engine#what-starl...

Still that part is kind of cool, 273K LOCs of the 335K

Yeah, I do plan to split the swift port into a separate project, so it can run on any platforms that swift can run on.

So basically it's really similar to Niri, but with a widget framework and bar bolted into it, and a rather nice glass shader; imo it's not AI that made the "cost of building a desktop" collapse, but rather the iceberg of architecture and prior art that is the burgeoning scene of other tiling wayland compositors, like Niri, River, Hyprland, Sway, etc...

I don't understand why this exists or why anyone would use it. It just looks like Cinnamon with a b00merang macOS skin. So if there's a critical bug or security vulnerability, are you prepared to support it? If not, why bother making this? Everyone will rather opt for one of the proven distros/desktops.

There is a why section on why I want to build this project: https://starling.build/why.html. Yes AI will fix all the bugs, just like it did in https://github.com/starling-build/starling/issues/5. Given other proven desktops may have strong anti AI policies, I think this project can out run them.

Well, AI or not, it is interesting to see Swift and Flutter without Dart. But is SNI Tray there? I see something in the top-right corner of that panel, but I'm not sure what it is.

There is no SNI tray yet. Top right corner is network, battery status.

This post makes me feel grief. I mean no offence to you OP, this looks like a beautiful desktop and I am sure there was a lot of time put into this. But just sharing my grief.

3 years ago if I saw a post on the HN front page about a desktop environment written in Flutter (or a Swift port of Flutter), I'd be absolutely blown away.

Now, I see this, and I feel nothing. I'm not impressed. I don't want to know how it works. I'm not going to read 300k lines of AI slop code. I don't care about architectural decisions made because they're not made under any true constraints. I'm not even excited about the AI part of it, because I know AI can do this. We could all build this if we just prompt hard enough.

I'm tired, boss.

I know the feeling but only people in our community care about how the software sausage is made. The customer only cares about results and it's great that AI can deliver results quickly. What I'm still waiting to see is evidence of reliability, performance and UX cohesion in these vibe coded applications.

Except for gamers, they are even more virulently anti-AI than this community is.

This community is very pro-AI. Just look at the top news, sometimes it's 3/4 AI topics. AI topics get hundreds of likes, AI critical news or stuff that hints at problems and undesirable consequences of the AI boom only get a fraction of it. HN readers just do not care. The majority here is hyped about AI. HN changed a lot since the LLM boom, not to the better, it got really boring in fact.

That is true but in the comments there are always negative sentiments, sometimes overwhelmingly so.

And from others we keep hearing that HN is too anti-AI. Of course neither is completely true. HN is a big community representing a spectrum of views. Few people are zealots in either direction. Most have moderate views that recognize the pros and cons, to varying degrees. No community as large as HN is ever unanimously pro or anti anything.

Did you look at the starling code?

There is another angle for this story. Without AI, people like me can just dream about an idea, but never or difficult to implement those ideas. Now it’s just possible: https://starling.build/why.html

But that page is also obviously written by AI. How do I know it's actually meaningful and not retroactively justified from the agent already having been instructed to create the project?

You won't, because your prejudice will prevent you from looking.

Great products are made through interaction with humans. Products like this one have barely had interaction with their creator, let alone early customers, and get foisted upon us with the expectation that we will happily download and execute god-knows-what made by god-knows-who, practically guaranteed to have an awful and thoughtless experience.

Then there’s the HNers who love that, nevermind the rules or intellectual curiosity, because they hope to likewise foist slop upon others and their agents and subagents are churning away even as they post their chatGPT "cleaned" comments about how awesome these products are.

These products need to go through a lot more before they come to HN. It’s not even AI-generation that’s the problem. Show at least a modicum of care, or earn trust by telling us who you are and why you made this (no, I don’t mean putting that in a Claude prompt and posting the result).

I think this is quite interesting…

  - another proof point that AI upends project economics 
  - AI will soon be able to make custom desktops and apps (msoffice clone anyone) that will undermine historic monopolies
  - if you are not doing to them they are doing it to you
  - makes language & framework a “don’t care”

Who would use this? There is no known author for starling. We don't know if a single person plagiarized another Window Manager, if it is a company or FSB effort.

Right now it is just another marketing stunt.

Author here, I am human. All code are open source.

No, thanks. I'll give this a pass.

So this is yet another Linux desktop environment (DE) But with “AI”.

Nicely done! This is an example of how engineering discipline mixed with good agent guidance can avoid the slop.

A couple of things:

- The test pyramid (static -> unit -> functional -> VM release gate) works but is dependent on someone remembering to run it locally. Some kind of CI would help here.

- The C++ Swift interop layer has some huge files. Understandable given that you're porting the framework rather than reimplementing it, but right now it's the least documented, most god-object part of the codebase.

Thanks for the suggestions. Ci is on the way.

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