AI reshapes what an 'OS' even means anymore
Original: What even is an OS now?
Why This Matters
If personal software creation scales to non-programmers, app stores, OS abstractions, and distribution models all face pressure.
Fly.io veteran Thomas Ptacek argues in a September 2026 essay that AI has quietly crossed a threshold: programming is no longer a specialist skill, and the era of prefabricated fixed-function apps is ending. Users now conjure personal software in plain English, dissolving the programmer/user divide.
Thomas Ptacek, departing Fly.io to work on a new project with Kurt, opens with a childhood memory: an 8-year-old who wanted to build games but got a BASIC prompt instead. Decades later, he says, computers finally work the way he imagined them then. His recent months have involved shipping multiple native macOS apps using AI-assisted development, blurring backend/frontend, web/native, and systems/application boundaries — each of which he calls a top-10 career-level shift on its own.
The deeper argument is about second-order effects. The first-order story — AI makes programmers faster — has been well covered. The one nobody is discussing: what happens when most applications have an audience of one or two people? Ptacek draws a historical arc from Egghead Software shelves to CDs to internet distribution, and predicts the next thing to erode is the very concept of prefabricated software. Future programs, he argues, will be conjured by users themselves to solve hyper-specific problems: not 'a weather app,' but one that accounts for lake-effect gaps between O'Hare sensors and Roscoe Village. He calls this not a prediction but an inevitability, on par with the sun rising in the east.