this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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Sorry for being an idiot, but what is an agentic OS?
Whatever it is, it sounds fucking stupid.
The OS doesnt need to be a focus. the OS is best when you completely forget its existence and can just do things without worry.
Which is why Windows 7 is the best operating system microsoft has, and seemingly will, ever produce.
Windows 10 had a better kernel than 7. Unfortunately, that kernel was packaged with the rest of windows 10.
"Agentic" is the buzzword to distinguish "LLM will tell you how to do it" versus "LLM will just execute the commands it thinks are right".
Particularly if a process is GUI driven, Agentic is seen as a more theoretically useful approach since a LLM 'how-to' would still be tedious to walk through yourself.
Given how LLM usually mis-predicts and doesn't do what I want, I'm no where near the point where I'd trust "Agentic" approaches. Hypothetically if it could be constrained to a domain where it can't do anything that can't trivially be undone, maybe, but given for example a recent VS Code issue where it turned out the "jail" placed around Agentic operations turned out to be ineffective, I'm not thinking too much of such claimed mitigations.
It's some AI crap they try to push on us.
This is really just a guess but... I think "agent" in this context means a personalised AI.
Training gen AI models requires huge amounts of resources. Its not practical to train an AI for your personal use.
Creating an agent is something like, taking an existing model, asking it to keep your entire browser history in mind while you ask it to do your homework.
IMO its actually one of the big limitations of gen AI, but somehow the word is supposed to mean the opposite. As in, the current approach has reached a dead end requiring exponentially more resources for less and less improvement. So because we can't make a model that just knows or learns everything, we have to make agents that know lots about specific things.
Wild guess:
Log everything the user is doing. Have clippy interface prompt the user to take some work off their hands. Do some web searches, start storing a dossier about the 'project'. Give the user a rough outline to complete their project based on a trained llm and some web searches. Ask the user if the outline looks good. Ask the user if they'd like some help completing some of the steps. Burning through tokens the whole time, storing telemetry with 100% knowledge of what they user does/wants to do. Selling that exact data to project management software companies and companies that write middleware to do this work. Bind everything together into a virtual notebook where users can return to any content at any step.
I mean I would love a linux distro that had a local agent that could answer queries. I view it as sorta like graphics compared to command line but if it needs networked resources outside of it doing its own searches. No thank you.
hear hear!
was such a good operating system.
Didnt need regular reformats to keep it stable/keep performance. was easy to use. stayed out of the way. you never had to even think about the OS cause it was just so transparent and invisible to everything you had to/wanted to do.
Agent work can be pretty magical. I've been using cursor recently and the fact that it can just execute commands on your PC means you can just tell it to do something and it does. Troubleshooting as it goes
Thing is, thats fine if you're doing something like working on a version controlled codebase where you can just roll back whatever the agent does if you dont like it. The idea of using a windows computer that had an AI fucking around with system settings and registry entries gives me shivers. Thats before getting into the possibilities of hostile actors managing to prompt your AI to do something like give up sensitive information by getting it to read malicious information on a website.
It's the future old man
Mobile-first seems to be the future 🤢
Win 7 sucked too.
Win XP was the beginning of enshitification.
You just have nostalgia.