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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> Author of the AI written os8088 OS here...

I'm curious about your goal in purchasing this project.

You don't get any peer recognition. You don't gain any special skill. You can't copyright it. You can't sell it. You can't use it for anything useful. You can't use it as a learning exercise. It can't really be built on. It can't serve as a tutorial for others to learn.

You don't get the satisfaction of a job well done (well, no more than the satisfaction you get from buying a toaster on Amazon).

Pre-LLM, something like this was a huge achievement. Now it's the equivalent of a 1st-grader showing off their finger-painting like it was the Mona Lisa.

So, what are you getting out of this?

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The goal is just to have the thing exist, I expect. Perhaps you might wonder to yourself: in some alternate timeline, where things played out somewhat differently, could the crappy old IBM PC have been coaxed into running an OS that was massively better than what we actually got? I suppose that won't appeal to everybody, and I suppose the idea of having the code largely auto-generated won't appeal to everybody either, but I think there'll be a few people left, and, for them: here it is.

In practical terms it's so useless that there's no point having a person spend time creating it, but, with AI changing the tradeoffs, now you can just have it created for you.

^ This... I am the "llm-driver"/"creator" for os8088 and my goal is this. Just to have some fun and make something useful for people (like me) that have dozens of old computers sitting in a room.

And...I do know how to write in assembly, VHDL, and higher level languages, but I also have a life, and I much rather have an LLM write out the assembly for a hobby like this one where I wanted something in 6 days, not 6 months.

That’s all fine and I don’t think anyone can malign you for that.

What we take exception to is how your project’s landing-page misrepresents the project by saying it’s “hand-written”, for example, and lacks any clear up-front AI-use disclosure.

I've removed the "hand-written" language that the LLM added. I added some information to the "What it is" section on the homepage that reads "The source is real-mode NASM assembly, written with AI, and it is on GitHub."

I thought about having a big flashing heading about the use of AI, but at that point, I think it was becoming more of a warning to AI triggered people than anything useful.

When people write things like this I wonder if they just haven't used AI coding agents. You don't simply write a prompt and walk away and have a complete program written when you get back. You still have to put a fair amount of effort in description often many times, not unlike the sort of work you'd have to put in if you were supervising a group of junior developers as a systems analyst. It's still work, just at a higher level. And until (and if ever) we get AGI humans will still have to do this.

> You still have to put a fair amount of effort in description often many times,

It's nowhere near "a fair amount of work". It's a fraction of a percent, if that. The reason I know this is because I am using LLMs quite deeply.

For this specific project, I'd be very surprised if the prompter needed to know anything more than:

1. Assembly exists. 2. The 8088 (and later) existed. 3. The target hardware's OSes did not support preemptive processes.

For Fable (which is what they used), it can infer the rest, with the user providing "No, that's not it, change the color" type of prompts.

This is something that hasn't been done before, and now exists.

Yes someone could spend immense amounts of time and effort, but clearly no one bothered to until AI made it easier.

yet the complainers will always complain because they don't have anything better to do with their own time...

"bugger off!" as they say.

None of what you say answers any of my questions.

It's hard to be impressed when someone purchases a new toaster, even if it's a bespoke toaster.

I want to know what the author thinks he got out of this.

And yet people have been impressed by my bespoke toaster

Let’s say you’re a musician and pay to go to a concert. What do you get out of it? Profit can come in many forms, including simply seeing that a thing is possible.

- Desired thing doesn't exist. - Author acts, using extremely helpful tools. - Desired thing now does exist.

Is that not enough?

A toaster.

I'm sure it is a learning exercise in OS development to some extent, just a lightweight exercise compared to doing it 'properly'.

FWIW I don't upvote submissions like this though, because it contributes to a climate of cheap superficial fame.

The worst part of this, is that projects that present themselves like this, poison the pool for everyone else. I imagine that many people are now disinclined to ever publish a hand-coded project in this genre (retro-computing), because people might assume that this was a trivial project (e.g. what are you so proud of, my baby 12-year-old nephew did something similar two weekends ago, just by yapping at his phone, while waiting for level-loading-screen to finish).

The Haiku project (an OS based on BeOS), is a remarkable achievement. It is sad that we may never see such things again, because people want their achievements to mean something, and, increasingly, intellectual achievements are becoming (unjustly and misleadingly) trivialized by the LLM hype machine.

It feels like humanity is deliberately making itself colorblind.

I went to Amazon the other day and ordered a fully custom piece of software. I chatted with the seller about exactly what I wanted, what areas to focus on, and they ended up teaching me a thing or two about the domain. Very similar emotional experience to using a language model, which I’ve totally done before.

How do you use Amazon to commission custom software? Was this through the retail site or AWS?

You are embarrassing yourself.

If you think LLM's allow you to wave a magic wand and anything gets done then you really are so anti LLM that you're now technically way way behind and just irrelevant.

Making software like this person has achieved is not just saying "do it" to an LLM and waking up in the morning.

Your anger towards LLMs has blinded you and set you back whilst everyone else moves ahead.

> If you think LLM's allow you to wave a magic wand and anything gets done then you really are so anti LLM that you're now technically way way behind and just irrelevant.

Honestly, I probably use 'em more than you.

> Your anger towards LLMs has blinded you and set you back whilst everyone else moves ahead.

If it makes you sleep better at night believing that, then sure, go ahead.

The reality is that most people lose any sort of status or respectability when they try to pass off difficult work as their own. This was true before LLMs, and will continue to be true, no matter how often someone shows us their equivalent of finger-painting.

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