There are already OSes that include LLM code (such as Linux). It's fine to have a few that don't.
The slop problem is very real. People are spewing reams of bad code that generates entropy faster than humans or LLMs can clean it up. LLM best practices are not yet obvious, and we're still figuring out how best to leverage them while maintaining code quality and human understanding.
... but LLMs are coming whether we want them or not. Models keep consistently improving, the slop keeps getting better, and human-only development is going to struggle to keep up.
In my day job, I'm driving an enormous number of tokens at Astra+Ultramax solving problems in Lean 4 that previously we never would have attempted simply due to the incredible human engineering cost; we review the high-level lemmas and let it prove the rest.
LLMs are the only solution I've seen over these decades that could finally close the feature/usability gap between mainstream and more niche operating systems -- software support, features, drivers, and other broad usability barriers. All of that has historically been far too much work for a much smaller developer community to reasonably undertake.
Hating AI isn't going to make it go away.
one of the reasons that BSDs are less popular is because of the community advice of "The best supported machine is a ten + year old thinkpad."
so yeah you're right there isn't a finish line, but you do need to keep up with current stuff enough to give a possible fan base a decent selection of hardware to run the thing on.
in other words : if the companies that the BSDs already had a hard time keeping up with hasten development via LLMs the gap will grow ever wider until a critical point is hit and the thing becomes irrelevant.
if linux is the only show in town that supports flashy-hardware-Z then it's going to drive audience migration.
the thing that has allowed openbsd to adopt new things so slowly is a rock-solid set of core competencies; the amount that bsd is entrenched into the internet itself makes irrelevance hard to imagine -- but it's still a facet.
I still hear people bitch that BSDs don't support WiFi, and that hasn't been true in years and years.
Think about how far Linux has/hasn't come in the last 10 years. The user experience is nicer, drivers "just work" more, there's more support for more stuff...but at the end of the day, the actual computing experience is mostly the same today as when I installed Debian back in 2016. It's polish, interoperability, etc that's improved.
Maybe VR takes off and takes over the desktop, and then openBSD can't keep up with that, but I don't think that's likely. So what are they trying to "keep up" with?
Ppl praise the stance of OpenBSD/NetBSD and what-not. That's commendable, but then close the tab, open their spotify and get back to agentic programming for their proprietary company source. But God-forbid if OpenBSD turns anything more than a museum OS, full of purity but with a user-base of five. Because the GPU doesn't work properly, the sound drive is clunjy, wifi might work, etc.
LLMs could port huge amount of drivers to both system with a fraction of the effort. Specs can be implemented easily and properly. Then of course, you need to test and that takes time, but it's technically easier and more ppl could contribute.
I get the feeling, but they're not OpenBSD a favor, if anything else I feel the exact opposite is happening.
As someone who has to professionally deal with AWS's feature breadth, this does not hit the way you expect.
Hahaha, fair! I meant feature-wise :-P
Meanwhile OpenBSD will get 9front's GeFS stabilized and it will work on a fraction of what BTRFS needs to function, and don't let me start on ZFS.
Could, but they don't. Latest Linux versions give compiler/linker errors (undefined references) which speaks great lenghts about the code quality.
In this case, reading the link you're replying under, it's being able to mount a disk formatted with a popular filesystem. The alternative here is waiting for a human to type this relatively "solved" problem, as a procedural requirement, more than anything.
So, it can easily mean "things won't work in this OS". But, that's to be expected with FreeBSD, for legitimately good (from the perspective of FreeBSD) reasons.
Whether you like this new reality or not, it is an objective fact that LLMs are the silver bullet Fred Brooks told us didn't exist—multiplying development speed by 10x or more—and that if you're not using them you are hobbling yourself. This especially goes for a "security-focused" OS like OpenBSD, because AI is more diligent about finding vulnerabilities and can do so without rest. Meaning that if you're serious about security, you are using AI to harden your software... and if not, someone else is using it to hack you.
That is not remotely an objective fact. It's an opinion, and it isn't even an accurate assessment of the tech at that.
I'm sitting here watching astra do in a day what would have taken me at least 3-6 months. The code is verified correct. The model finds, reads, understands, and then integrates the latest literature into its designs and plans. It implements the code, proves it correct, and has come up with its own novel solutions on top of the state of the art. It then refines its implementation to hit the performance goals I give it. This is the reality today.
I've got some bad news for you.
We're solving problems now that we never even would have attempted previously. We couldn't have even staffed them if we wanted to. Even if we had the people, it would be years of development before we saw usable results.
If you can't understand how this kind of work would take a human with a few decades of experience 3-6 months, you're the 0.05 developer in my world.
[[citation needed]]