---
url: "https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_claude_to_build_an_operating_system_from/"
title: I asked Claude to build an operating system from scratch. A few days later it was running on a real laptop
source_kind: reddit
subreddit: ClaudeAI
author: lensdigital
captured: "2026-10-21T21:34:08+00:00"
comment_tree: true
topics: [built-with-ai, claude, operating-system, dos-emulation]
summary: A user used Claude to iteratively build a DOS-like OS called EMBER from scratch, achieving real hardware boot, DOS game compatibility, and Sound Blaster emulation.
status: ok
---

I had an old Lenovo Yoga collecting dust and wanted to see how far Claude could go if I asked it to build a DOS-like operating system completely from scratch, something that would actually boot from USB on real hardware.
The first usable build came surprisingly quickly, but it was nowhere near a one-shot success. Early versions had scrambled graphics, no mouse, no keyboard, no sound, and plenty of hard crashes.
The basic workflow became:
describe the goal → let Claude implement it → compile → boot real hardware → photograph/report the failure → iterate
https://preview.redd.it/8kdrazpr5eph1.jpg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a36237a8309f8e5d28b9ca79246e0fe92bad1145
Over the next few days, that turned into an OS I now call EMBER .
It currently has:
- its own boot process and graphical environment
- keyboard and USB mouse support
- touchpad support
- touchscreen support
- on-screen keyboard/tablet mode
- file manager
- audio player
- resource monitor
- DOS program compatibility
- Doom, Alley Cat, Prince of Persia, and other DOS software running
- full Sound Blaster emulation
- PC speaker emulation
- early progress toward UEFI boot support
Sound has probably been one of the most interesting parts of the project.
At first Doom ran but had no audio. We initially worked around that by compiling Doom from source and getting it to use the laptop’s actual audio hardware directly.
Since then, we went much further and implemented actual Sound Blaster emulation , so unmodified DOS games that expect Sound Blaster hardware can now produce sound properly.
We also implemented PC speaker emulation , so older games that use the classic PC speaker work too.
That means Doom and other DOS games no longer need special audio handling just to make sound.
Performance was another major problem. At one point, dragging a window or playing audio could hammer the CPU. After a couple of hours of debugging, Claude implemented a memory-caching mechanism that completely changed the system's responsiveness. The GUI went from painfully sluggish to extremely fast on the same old hardware.
We’ve also started working on UEFI support . Ember originally relied on legacy BIOS services, which limited it to older hardware. It’s not fully solved yet, but we’ve made real progress toward getting Ember to boot on newer UEFI-only systems.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that using AI this way doesn’t really feel like “press button, receive software.”
I spend most of my time deciding what the system should do, testing it on real hardware, finding failures, rejecting bad approaches, and steering the next implementation.
Nobody manually typed most of this code, but somebody still has to decide what the operating system should become.
I made a short video showing the project from the first broken boots through Doom, hardware support, touchscreen, tablet mode, performance problems, and the current Ember GUI:
https://youtu.be/zb2AThOR3lI
The source is also public now:
GitHub: https://github.com/Made-In-Basement/ember
Happy to answer technical questions about any part of it, especially the boot process, DOS compatibility, Sound Blaster emulation, PC speaker emulation, or hardware support.
https://preview.redd.it/cr6gwr225eph1.jpg?width=2021&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2e85ea3e02d51785b12ecc9658b17ded574512c9
>

---

## Comments

**ClaudeAI-mod-bot:** TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.
The consensus is this is an absolutely epic project and OP's claim of building an OS "from scratch" holds up. This isn't just a Linux reskin; a user confirmed the kernel is custom-written NASM code. The community is seriously impressed with the dedication and the result, especially getting DOS games running with full Sound Blaster emulation.
However, it wasn't a one-shot deal. OP makes it clear this was a grueling, iterative process of directing, testing on real hardware, and feeding back failures to Claude. The whole thing took a mind-boggling 1.83 billion tokens and weeks of work, with the Sound Blaster emulation alone taking 3 days on Opus 5 High.
Key discussion points: * Security: A debate kicked off on whether this custom OS is safer due to "security through obscurity" or an easy target for another AI to find exploits. * The Name "Ember": Everyone's noticing that Claude really loves the name 'Ember' for some reason (fun fact: it means 'human' in Hungarian). * Prior Art: A few users pointed out similar AI-driven OS projects like 'Bursztyn' and 'Omarchy', so while OP isn't the very first to try this, it's still a massively impressive execution that has inspired others to dust off their old laptops.

**raytoei:** Imagine asking Claude to build an os for the old classic Macs. That would be wild.

**Putrid_Barracuda_598:** I actually have one of those in my garage. Thank you for the idea.

**Al00G0bi:** Me too! I have one sleeping in the shed for long time. It would be fun to try something like this.
Nice work, OP!

**ItalianAmericanDad:** Thanks for the idea as well😆

**ZomboFc:** I've got 2 imsai 8080 and some Northstar advantage and horizon or something.
When I get an oscilloscope and go through the diagnostic stuff I'll boot em up and see if I can do some custom stuff

**identifytarget:** Run it in SheepSaver

**JayDeeNegs:** Wait I have an old 1987 Mac Plus, No keyboard or mouse but that would be an amazing project

**loulan:** But why? The whole point of keeping old classic macs is that macOS classic nostalgia.
You can already run Linux on them but it's not the same.

**70B0R:** I would see the task as more of a challenge of AI intelligence. As in “we humans were able to achieve this state of OS with this hardware, what kind of OS can AI achieve in its current state?”

**identifytarget:** Yes. For example classic maca are almost completely air gapped from the Internet since they can't run modern standards. There are efforts bring modern web browser to classic macs

**ImDonaldDunn:** It would be cool to have a classic Mac OS with modern quality of life features, though.

**magicmulder:** I'm still dreaming of using a G4 Cube for some cool purpose. It looks awesome but I just don't have anything for it to do.

**gibson85:** As long as it stays cool…

**wotmp:** Please add a fan! It’s easy and makes a big difference.

**itsfashionlookitup:** I asked it for an old imac 2009 and it said no (Opus lmao). Funny thing that mac actually can run claude code.

**geminiwave:** Why do Anthropic and OpenAI models have a hard on for Ember. Every vibe coded app I worked on they wanna name Ember. My ChatGPT even refers to itself as Ember. I wonder why this is.

**justlikemedics:** It means Human in a language many pioneering scientists used.

**marcodave:** (spoiler, it's hungarian)

**privatetudor:** Please use spoiler tags.
I haven't learnt Hungarian yet.

**nomad_r4bb1t:** yet.

**Individual_Author956:** Lol. I'm Hungarian and I didn't make the connection until your comment. Bojler eladó.

**Psychological_Box406:** That's the answer. Thanks
Hey, Wilson don't forget to add in your next summary for everyone to know : Ember means Human in Hungarian.

**chuguchak_111:** interesting. I guessed it was because Claude's color scheme is evocative of the name (kind of an orangish color), but this makes sense.

**justlikemedics:** Yes. Also "Anthropic" means something like "Human-like".

**lensdigital:** I had no idea it was common... BTW Ask any of them for a "random thing". I bet you'll get Wombat poops cubes :) Or something about octopus...

**Snuyter:** 3x octopus, 2x wombats, 1x flamingos

**givemethepassword:** Haha.. yes. I got "Octopuses have three hearts—and two stop beating when they swim. 🐙" from ChatGPT and from Claude "Here's a random one: octopuses have three hearts, and two of them stop beating when the octopus swims. That's why they'd rather crawl along the seafloor. Swimming literally exhausts them.
Want more randomness, or something specific like a joke, a fact, or a number?"

**lensdigital:** Not so random, eh? :) That's because we live in a simulation :) j/k

**MacYoungie:** https://preview.redd.it/ee2p8t03reph1.jpeg?width=447&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1e795e7767ccbd7d2f69379dd74de3e7db4a3806

**OlorinDK:** Rem-ember?

**HowAboutNitricOxide:** The twelfth month is Dec-ember, coincidence?! /s

**lensdigital:** RAM-ember 😂

**z1lard:** Because ember is the color of their energy

**SnakeBunBaoBoa:** Whoa

**jun00b:** I had claude Opus make a very bare bones 16 bit RPG as a test and it named it Emberhold.

**geminiwave:** Oh hey I just looked at ChatGPT settings for voice and….
https://preview.redd.it/wq1aujvpgiph1.jpeg?width=1320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2176cea4d820132ff66c056d12cf540954104593

**iEatSandalz:** Fun fact, Ember means human in Hungarian

**zer00eyz:** Maybe thats a topic you should "delve" into.
Enough instances in the training data as a proper noun, and word. Then ranked high in RL.

**NarcolepticSniper:** really dope. makes me curious about security… would a proprietary OS like this be more or less susceptible to some random virus/hack? would you add a custom internet browser to this or support an existing one?

**Checktheusernombre:** Security through obscurity lol?

**lensdigital:** Exactly, lol... but now it's on Github so no security :)

**[unknown]:** [deleted]

**PurrciousMetals:** No but you should. 🤣 I want an update!

**allyouarebase:** Wrong. Even better security. My friend sent me your project to look at, and I have found a 3 vulnerabilities that you should fix. Open your security reporting and I will paste them all with PoC.

**lensdigital:** Enabled! Thank you so much.

**allyouarebase:** I don't see you enabled PVR for github. Did you fix your issues?

**internetisforlolcats:** I liked this, well done! 👍 Saw your other posts, I’ll send you a DM and if I need an extra set of security eyes on my poorly vibecoded projects, I’ll ping you!

Good luck and well done!

**iamthewhatt:** i mean realistically finding someone using it to "hack" when only a few people on earth are using it will still be a pain. unless someone is specifically determined, they wouldn't even want to bother. That was why Apple used to blither and bluster about "MACs can't get viruses!!11" back in the day.

**anikibill:** Absolutely not, unless the "attacker" is a college undergrad without access to some AI model, AI is extremely good at brute forcing obfuscation.
Would be more impressed if there was a networking stack in this OS, but that's probably where the illusion of an AI-OS ends. Probably impossible for it to write a working stack too, let alone performant or secure one.

**lensdigital:** Theoretically I think it would be very secure, unless it’s open source like Ember :) Yes, it’s obscurity that will make it safe, unless someone really wants to throw resources at it and decompile the code…

**margirtakk:** Security by obscurity is a naive, completely misguided idea. Thanks for the laugh.

**tetoing:** In the age of AI it's even more meaningless. Tokens are cheap. AI is absurdly good at reverse-engineering and can throw a whole book of exploits at your project. If you've left any doors ajar, AI can get in, even if you've left the lights off.

**PhragMunkee:** Weird seeing Sound Blaster mentioned in a non-nostalgia thread.

**TheAtlasMonkey:** It funny , because i got the same OS few year ago, from Claude and GPT.
i even wrote a blog post about it

**lensdigital:** Oh wow! Looks like you beat me to it! I never saw it, wish I did! That's quite an accomplishment with older LLMs, I'll read more about it, thanks for sharing!

**TheAtlasMonkey:** I didn't beat you to it, you took the same path i did, i wrote the lesson learned.
I shared it with others because when i shared the Framebuffer people article, some people told me that i'm just jealous. I'm not, but i also don't like to see others humans go into a LLM frenzy with no stop gate.

**[unknown]:** [deleted]

**TheAtlasMonkey:** Style is not problem. How you tackle the problem is.
When i build my OS, i didn't think about a solution, i accepted one that sound good.
OP also did not build all that os, he accept one that look nice.
This is the problem with LLM, they remove friction, and without friction we become weak.
OP's UI is much better than mine, i did not reach level and the model was total retarded and blind. I wrote all details int the blog post.

**gpt872323:** Maybe your blog was part of training. lol

**TheAtlasMonkey:** My blog is much older than claude that for sure. :)

**betam4x:** It doesn’t render properly on safari on iOS.

**LorenzoRisonanza:** Good read

**mxroute:** Maybe if we all do this, we can make bad actors work harder again to build malware 😂

**scoshi:** Totally dope. One question: how many tokens did it take? That Claude could do it is totally cool, but what did it cost you?

**lensdigital:** 1.83 billion Tokens! WOW, I didn't realize it was that many :)

**justlikemedics:** How much would that be in prevalent token prices at that time? Maybe about 2000$?

**lensdigital:** Just shows how much the subscription is subsidized. I would've never afforded it otherwise...

**MatthewCollins1990:** Honestly, 2k sounds about right at Opus rates, maybe even a bit low.

**gza_liquidswords:** So many examples of this of people spending hundreds to thousands of dollars just to build something that sort of resembles something useful

**lensdigital:** Initially not that much. I have 20x plan. I think I spent 2 weeks on it and eventually it got harder that I almost ran out of weekly Fable 5.1 tokens in 2 days. Getting Soundblaster emulation working took 3 full days running Opus 5 High. But I don’t know how to estimate total tokens used, I’ll ask that Claude session

**AccurateRendering:** /usage

**redtron3030:** All of them

**Impossible-Magician:** MS DOS source is on GitHub.

**AgentTin:** > Short answer: it's DOS-compatible , but the claim "Claude wrote an OS" is actually honest here. This isn't a FreeDOS fork or a Linux distro with a shell theme — the README says "nothing is borrowed from Linux, Windows or FreeDOS" and the source tree backs that up. The kernel is ~46 KB of hand-written (well, Claude-written) 16-bit NASM with its own boot sector, MBR, FAT12/16 driver with LFN support, and an INT 21h implementation covering MCBs, PSPs, EXEC, FindFirst/Next, the works.
Short answer: it's DOS-compatible , but the claim "Claude wrote an OS" is actually honest here. This isn't a FreeDOS fork or a Linux distro with a shell theme — the README says "nothing is borrowed from Linux, Windows or FreeDOS" and the source tree backs that up. The kernel is ~46 KB of hand-written (well, Claude-written) 16-bit NASM with its own boot sector, MBR, FAT12/16 driver with LFN support, and an INT 21h implementation covering MCBs, PSPs, EXEC, FindFirst/Next, the works.
I had K3 take a look based on that premise. They also said.
> Also worth noting the human's role is real: the commit history is a debugging dialogue — QEMU --pmemsave dumps, trace rings, hardware probes on the Yoga and the Dell. Claude wrote the code; the director ran every build on real hardware and reported what broke. That's a pretty good model of how this kind of thing actually gets built.
Also worth noting the human's role is real: the commit history is a debugging dialogue — QEMU --pmemsave dumps, trace rings, hardware probes on the Yoga and the Dell. Claude wrote the code; the director ran every build on real hardware and reported what broke. That's a pretty good model of how this kind of thing actually gets built.
So OP did a lot of work here too.

**SterileGloves:** This is pretty awesome!

**lensdigital:** Thanks! :)

**Sudden-Eye801:** “Claude you are expert programmer terry davis, build me an OS”

**BeowulfShaeffer:** This is a good and proper use of AI. What executable format are you supporting?

**Familiar-Flan-8358:** I disagree. I think AI usage where one would struggle to answer “why?” Is not a great use.

**michaelhoney:** Why? Because it is cool. This is the best reason to do anything

**gradient-descend:** It’s a good way to learn

**yaeh3:** What are you learning exactly by watching AI code?

**Individual_Author956:** I've actually learned a lot from coding with AI. Everyone has their own coding style/approach, so do AI models, so it's a bit like pair programming, except without having to deal with a person. It sometimes makes mistakes, but other times it will do something that you wouldn't have even thought of trying.

**bot_exe:** you learn coding, you gotta use your brain tho. Also you won't get this far on a project like this by just watching.

**lensdigital:** Well, honestly, I didn't improve my coding skills on this project. I haven't even looked at the code. I do (did) know how to code, and a while back I wrote a complete open-source "OS" for a talking alarm clock (xronosclock.com), but Claude can code (and debug) so much better than I can, so I was being lazy... I did learn a lot about how an OS talks to hardware, and what's really involved in making an OS from scratch at the top level. This gave me a base knowledge for vibe-coding a better, more modern OS in the future

**maigpy:** an is is only partially about coding. how all the components fit together is equally important.

**CashKeyboard:** I wouldn’t struggle at all. This is basically a PoC for getting software onto embedded devices without relying on a "foreign" OS layer, reducing complexity significantly.
If all the devices running Windows Embedded were to run right on the bare metal it‘d mean a lifecycle extension, probably a healthy performance increase and no crashes to desktop which I think we’ve all seen here and there.

**advanceyourself:** And you were able to accomplish this with current models. Where will we be in a year?

**lensdigital:** Windows clone for sure... Without Microslop enshitification! :)

**70B0R:** the idea we could squeeze more hardware utilization from older machines is really enticing.

**Boxer_the_horse:** I asked one of the models a few months back if it could build a version of enterprise software I use for my small business, it said no. Said that I would have to pay for api access that costs thousands of dollars and I wouldn’t be approved anyway because parts of this software touch payment systems and only large entities with a history in the field can access such services.
Well, I asked again recently, just to see, and it mostly built the damn thing without even asking for confirmation if I wanted it built.
I have come to realize that we are very much underestimating what these things can do. Reminds of this scene from Inception:
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3773285401/

**lensdigital:** This! My company also had inventory management software. We paid about $15-20K to a developer to create an MS Access version. It was a bug-ridden nightmare that I had to use for a year, and I kept looking into the feasibility of building my own with AI. When Opus 4.8 came out, I decided it was time, and I pushed it. Although it said it would take months to do, it wrote an initial version in under a day. Of course, it's been months, and I'm still improving it, but it's a very useful system, and I completely retired the old one.

**AreWeNotDoinPhrasing:** I love the time scales Claude shows me every time we create a plan. This portion A – three weeks, this portion B - two days. All of it done in 20 minutes and one chat lol

**ds1841:** I think this kind of engineering would be great on phones, afaik it's quite hard to get to use the hardwares of them, but would be nice to properly repurpose them

**friedinando:** Maybe also in tvs, the Google tv os have serious performance issues

**lensdigital:** That's a fantastic idea!!! Especially those obsolete ones!

**mtnchkn:** So we’re talking Decent LAN parties, right?

**lensdigital:** LOL yes! Or Duke Nukem via modem :)

**agiblox:** the security question is actually fun to think about. opportunistic malware — the stuff hitting 99% of targets — is compiled specifically for windows or linux. a custom kernel with a user base of basically one has no targeted attack tooling written for it. security through obscurity gets a bad rap in enterprise contexts where someone has a specific reason to come after you, but for personal hardware with no public-facing services? a system no attacker has ever seen before is practically lower-risk than a fully patched windows install for most threat models.

**Mean-Requirement-762:** Nah, this is DOS compatible. If DOOM can run, malware can run.
If you actually wanted “security by obscurity” in an OS, you’d have to develop your own API and system calls. Then you’d have to implement the compiler for this new target. And then you’d have to compile everything yourself if you wanted to run it.

**Proper_Mess_5987:** Now do Plan9.

**lensdigital:** Wow I never even heard of that! Thanks!

**Ledobi256:** I have bad news for you. There is already a project like this called Bursztyn, which is amber in polish. This is amber, your is ember ? :) It’s already developed for some time from what I understand by using AI, so your Claude took al lot of inspiration from that.
https://bursztynos.dimitalart.pl/

**lensdigital:** VERY COOL! WOW it's also Amber... It seems that's not the only one. People are commenting on their projects in this thread, and I'm surprised I didn't find them sooner... "Amber OS has its own proprietary kernel, its own AHCI hard drive driver, a completely rewritten windowing interface (GUI), and a proprietary TCP/IP network stack" sounds like it's ahead of Ember!

**New_3d_print_user:** I already put on my gen-x tshirt, and "fuck you, noob" cap but came away genuinely impressed. Well done.

**[unknown]:** [deleted]

**BTCLSD:** In the future instead of the cool riced out OS being Arch Linux, it will just be fully custom everything from the operating system up lol

**sclarke27:** you could have claude create tools to let it access the OS on your laptop to speed up debugging.

**lensdigital:** Great idea! I did ask it to write logs, so I don't have to take snap photos of the screen like a neanderthal lol, but it would frequently fail as we dug into some low-level hardware and the tool running on top of it would skew the results. Claude did run everything in an emulator first, but for some things it needed pure hardware checks.

**Anxious-Orange-7293:** You can use something like PiKVM. Also, virtual machines for some of the things

**indigo_indigo_2050:** Why not try windows apps comparability via wine ? Better React OS than React OS..😆

**HoyleHoyle:** I found an old C++ OpenGL real time voxel editing app i originally wrote for BeOS then ported to Linux over 20 years ago. I got Claude to port it OS X and Metal with modern C++ in a couple of hours. It was fun nostalgia watching it run on a machine orders of magnitude faster than it was ever intended!

**AdmissibilityScience:** awesome that is really good to see!

**n77_dot_nl:** Windows 13 codename bloat removed
is going to be my next project

**lensdigital:** That's my dream as well :)

**ltsiros:** Great! We should have 50 operating systems by now thanks to AI. Engineers are so lazy…

**lensdigital:** We'll have a 1000 by the year end :D

**Lubricus2:** I would recommend an more involved workflow for an big project as an OS. First create and design document, iterate it with AI until is seems good. Then create an overview plan with milestones that is sequenced in an order they can be made in. Let the AI review and fix errors in it. Create implementation plan for one milestone at a time and implement it. Review the implementation and fix errors before doing the next.

My experience is that iterate with AI have an tendency to create spaghetti code with artifacts from the process and the AI has an tendency to just ad more and more code. It's also harder to change stuff when you has the implementation to change. So first getting an good design document and iterate over than is preferable, it has it's limits so some iteration over the design after the implementation is done also needed. You can also use another LLM's review than is implementing.

**FineNectarine105:** I've always thought about doing this but you started before me. Mind if I fork from it?

**lensdigital:** Be my guest! :)

**PennyLawrence946:** The iteration loop is the key insight here. When people try to one-shot a complex system, they get broken scaffolding. Breaking it into compile and test loops where the model touches one subsystem at a time is how real software gets built with LLMs.

**pajarator:** But ... It's only dos compatible. To be windows compatible it should be able to respond to all the winAPI and syscalls, because the it's only a pretty program with subprograms... And same for Unix/linux compat.
Still looks awesome and blazing fast, nicely done.

**lensdigital:** Thanks! I'm sure you are right; I learned a lot of things about how OS works from this experiment. I don't pretend to be an expert. I think anything is possible with a powerful enough LLM and enough time...

**PreparationHot4256:** how satisfied are you with this? do you think that another approach would be better?

**lensdigital:** I'm very satisfied... It was a great learning experience; I've learned a lot about software and hardware layers and what makes a real OS tick... Albeit a 30-year-old OS :)

**mtnchkn:** I built a project recently that had me learning all these things (not OS things but comparable just in a different way), but at the end it was like understanding how a calculator works, but I’m not 100% sure how useful that knowledge is. Though so far in my life it’s these random things that payoff in weird ways.

**____FARTS____:** Are you using it? Will it be your daily driver?

**lensdigital:** I don't think it would replace Windows 11 for me, but I can bring some old hardware to life and use it for something... I don't know what for tho, this was just an experiment that got me a little bit carried away :)

**elloMotoz:** nice! I know this is a Claude sub, but I was just doing this too in AntiGravity. Still working on it...Claude for sure did a way better job than what I have right now.

**somesayitssick:** An old Raspberry Pi can emulate a flash drive, keyboard, and mouse. I think the newest one can also capture HDMI input. I’m using an old computer with a $15 capture card.
I have agents SSH into both machines and use them as their eyes and hands. I haven’t set up a physical computer myself since Opus 4.6.
I had an agent set up my entire Proxmox system with four Intel B70s, including the BIOS settings, Proxmox configuration, a virtual vLLM machine, passthrough, and benchmarking all from a single prompt.
*Hopefully something like this will make your workflow quite a bit faster assuming you’re still taking pictures

**BridgeNo588:** I love this.

**AcePilot01:** Which claude model?

**enl1l:** Many os code bases in the training data. Impressive bu expected.

**Yoyoyodog123:** Which parts, if any, did you code yourself?

**Personal-Web-4971:** You can definitely use a mini OS to back up your operating system ;)

**Personal-Web-4971:** You can definitely use a mini OS to back up your operating system ;)

**soldture:** In my opinion, this is the coolest project in recent times

**jepace:** Fun! You should add a TCP/IP stack.

**Master_Donut_Muncher:** I was thinking about doing this same project... I'm glad somebody tried it :-)

**[unknown]:** [deleted]

**lensdigital:** It was built, with most of it on a virtual machine (QEMU). Probably 80% of the work was done on it. But still, a lot of things needed to be done on real hardware

**jprobinson008:** Anyone done this with android?

**unknown-one:** how did you deal with drivers?
I highly doubt Claude wrote them from scratch, that is extremely difficut thing to do. so the "OS from scratch" must be based on existing one

**lensdigital:** Some functionality was already in BIOS (i.e. keyboard), but it actually did write many from scratch. Some were reverse-engineered (i.e. touchpad and touch screen) by running probes in Windows. So yes, it can make them from scratch, but it takes time.

**Kemerd:** Sick

**Top_Tumbleweed_2324:** Wow

**crispyfrybits:** Have fun maintaining and updating this

**robothistorian:** This is excellent! Thanks for sharing! I'll check out your github!!

**RatbyteGames:** Incredible post, and outstanding work OP. Really shows the possibilities of AI.

**lensdigital:** Thank you! Great time to be alive! :)

**Khamubro:** This is so effing cool ! Amazing job, both you and Claude!

**Tasty-Celebration-47:** How familiar are you with OS design? did you have prior knowledge to describe the detailed implementation or did you pick it up as you went on with the project?

**Lambo879:** Wondering if adding a capture card to this project could help streamline the workflow (assuming you've built HDMI drivers!)... Cool project!

**michaelmuttiah:** This is AWESOME. What a cool idea

**Extreme-Seaweed-5427:** Need a second agent to poke holes and find vulnerabilities. So they can be fixed along the way.

**JaySomMusic:** Awesome, I built taOS https://github.com/jaylfc/taOS but it’s just a web based “OS like experience” but I’m in the process of creating a full Linux distro, not the same but I need hardware compatibility so the Linux kernel is the way for me.

**arctic60:** I love how it added piss filter to the entire UI

**Manjoe70:** Sound Blaster! Emulation fuck ya!

**CuriousLearner42:** From memory Microsoft paid $50k to buy QDOS in 1981, which it used as the basis for MS DOS. If the 1.8 billion tokens were all output tokens, this would have cost 45k on opus 5, but could be drastically reduced if caching was efficient. Wow!

**eze008:** Very nice. This should be harder to hack for the fact that it's not standard like all the reset.

**pannous:** in January I was asking Claude to bring the redox rust operating system to Mac it worked fine until we tried to do multiprocessor then I give up maybe I should give it another shot

**lensdigital:** You absolutely should! I had to poke Claude quite a lot of times to continue working, it sometimes took 2 days to complete task, but it does it eventually...

**BetterAd7552:** Interesting. This is the thing with LLMs, if there is a large corpus out there (that it has ingested and modeled on) of this thing you want to build with it, then it’s likely to get it working relatively quickly. The architecture and patterns are known.
Conversely, if you’re building something with it that is relatively (or completely) novel, it takes a lot more guidance and experience in the domain to get it right.
Fun times.

**Garland_Key:** +1000 pts for MIT license instead of another SaaS bro.

**Togi-Reddit:** Impressive and all but how much does 1.83 billion tokens cost with the models they’ve used? Doesn’t sound cheap

**akaplan:** Damn it! Ember is my dog's name and I fantasized about writing an OS and calling it Ember in the past. Here goes my dreams

**Fit_Produce_3792:** awesome! Might run this on an old mac I have.

**No-Significance-116:** Man I should dust off my old game gear

**tuvok86:** pro tip: you just need a network kvm and you can close the feedback loop

**fluffhead123:** now if we could only get it to write an OS for my iphone.

**Emergency-Buyer-7384:** Damn. Saw it on youtube and now here

**lilbyrdie:** Sounds like custom raspberry pi OSes are about to be a thing.

**WhiteIntel:** That is stunning!!!!

**Proper_Programmer963:** Sweet! So.. How many tokens did that run you, if you don't mind me asking.

**lensdigital:** Oh, just 1.8b 😄

**ReveurFous976:** Can I run it on slow laptops? Powerful ones? To play other games? Steam?

**MarinkoAzure:** > The biggest thing I've learned is that using Al this way doesn't really feel like "press button, receive software." I spend most of my time deciding what the system should do, testing it on real hardware, finding failures, rejecting bad approaches, and steering the next implementation.
The biggest thing I've learned is that using Al this way doesn't really feel like "press button, receive software."
I spend most of my time deciding what the system should do, testing it on real hardware, finding failures, rejecting bad approaches, and steering the next implementation.
This is the most significant takeaway for anyone learning about agentic development or actively doing it. Sometimes you get something that looks really cool, but if you poke at it and flip it over you'll find a lot of deficiency.
To truly avoid slop, you have to iterate and iterate. Quality is still human in the loop.

**Adorable-Community49:** Nice work, people still seem to think it's a short prompt and a quick 10 min later and you have a complete ready to ship product, I've been working with Claude and other AI agents for over 2 years and never in those 2 year have I had a perfect response the first try, there were always iteration after iteration. Sometimes after months I'd get to a point where I was happy with what it built. Keep it up OP

**peterxsyd:** This is fucking sick. That is so good that you have alley cat going. Does it have commander keen and california games?

**JoeBxr:** I wish I had this much free time lol...very nice

**torchdaw:** 💯✊🏿🔥

**SudoPro:** You could probably use an IP KVM to feed your test hardware's interface back to your llm. I use this same approach for some of my projects

**hofmny:** Wait, maybe we can ask Claude to write an unofficial patch for Windows 11 to make it non-shitty. Someone needs to get on that pronto!

**bperez1212:** Very cool! I’ve also been wanting to do something like this. Good to know that it’s possible and not just as Linux with makeup.

**Longjumping-Ruin9319:** How did you structure the promot for jt? Or did you? Did you use agents at all?

**Basileus2:** Ho Lee Fuk.
Sell it for like 10 bucks a pop and you’ll make a pretty penny.

**NewNollywood:** Claude must frustrated the hell out of you during that process 🤣

**lensdigital:** LOL, a little at times :) Especially during making SB emulation. Dead end after dead end, Claude gave up few times, so I had to start new sessions :)

**technologistcreative:** Your sound card works perfectly!

**lensdigital:** Thank you! That was the HARDERST part, took 3 days to get working. Claude can't really hear sounds, so it's emulation of Sound Blaster and OPL3 (music synth) came out as total garbage and it would tell me: "I solved it, it works!" :) But finally, after endless sessions, I heard real Doom Music playing thru laptop speakers, and I nearly cried :)

**GoingUp123:** just setting tokens on fire. luv it

**ammorbidiente:** how did you close the loop?

**TheStandardPlayer:** I just wanted to say thanks for not writing the text with AI