Among all the machines of the 8-bit home computer era which booted straight to a BASIC prompt, there were a very few that went their own way with another language. The Jupiter Ace springs immediately to mind, a diminutive Z80-based machine similar to Sinclair’s ZX81, which booted to FORTH.
The Ace wasn’t a commercial success, but what would have happened had it booted to a more accessible language? It’s a question [jordanhubbard] appears to be trying to answer, with an OS that boots to a Python interpreter.. The OS is Python, and everything on top of it uses the interpreter. Better still, it has a GUI mode.
The OS boots on an x86-64 platform or in QEMU, and appears to have been created using an LLM. There are two build options for the GUI version or the interpreter version. It provides a set of UNIX-like commands for interacting with the OS and disk, something which brings back memories of disk-based systems back in the BASIC days. We’re surprised to see no screenshots of the GUI in action though, an omission he’d do well to correct, we think.
It’s fair to say that in 2026 this is more a bit of fun than a serious OS contender, but maybe someone will run with it. It has competition too, not so long ago we featured a similar OS that runs a BASIC interpreter.
Please stop
Stop what?
Playing second hand broken telephone with an LLM.
guess it’s slop-a-day now
When asked about a dedicated “code assistant experiences” category, the HaD argument was that there are tags.
Posted in “Software Hacks”, Tagged “interpreter, operating system, python”
One shouldn’t need to follow the links to check whether the article was being honest about the content.
The most cynical part is that the “README” is paged upon pages of slop. Nobody wrote this, and nobody intended it to be read. In it, you find stuff like:
“.. “This,” the programmer said, “proves that Python is a real multitasking kernel.”
Sir Reginald walked across the keyboard. The shell printed TypeError: unsupported operand and terminated. The programmer noted this was a separate bug and filed it accordingly. ..”
Since this’ll vanish in a moment anyway, here’s that the pages of generated story allegedly are about:
“A note on provenance: This section exists as the author’s official memory marker for projects that have been substantially co-developed with an AI assistant. The author will not remember which projects these are in ten years. He will also not remember this note. He will, however, be able to grep for it, and that is the point. All future AI-assisted projects will include an equally implausible origin story as a breadcrumb. The convention is simple: if a project has one of these sections, an AI was meaningfully involved. If it doesn’t, the author did it alone, and it will show.
Part 1 of an ongoing chronicle. Part 2: sheme → Sir Reginald von Fluffington III appears throughout. He does not endorse any of it.”
https://github.com/jordanhubbard/shemacs#the-totally-true-and-not-at-all-embellished-history-of-shemacs
Is an article written about AI slop second hand slop? As in, second hand smoking?
This probably needs addressing. The article itself is meat-based, I wrote it.
Yes, the project is LLM-created. It’s an interesting path for us covering these things, because increasingly they are used in the creation of projects in our field. You’re not going to escape that by complaining about AI, whether we like it or not it’s part of our world now.
As a rule of thumb, if the project itself is interesting or novel and the author is clear about their LLM usage, it’s still worthy of being written up here on the basis of being an interesting project.
“Slop” is a term used for low quality content, whatever it is. This is an OS that boots into Python, whoever wrote it that’s an interesting project. Merely having an LLM involved does not have to confer slop status.
For avoidance of any doubt, I have lost a good side gig writing software docs because my employer drank the AI Kool-Aid. There’s no AI worship here, just being realistic about the tools people are using in 2026.
Compare to AI slop on youtube: the subject of the video may be interesting and novel on the face of it, but the contents of the video is just a slideshow of photos and generated imagery with an AI narrator talking glittering nonsense and repeating itself ten times to make the minutes. None of the facts or claims can be trusted, none of the imagery can be trusted.
The entire video is actually a tremendous waste of time, because you would have to go on a fact-finding research mission to confirm or deny everything that it presents – unless you already know it, but then why would you need to watch the video? Still, you need to watch through it to say it’s bunk or not.
That is why we turn away at the first sings of slop, because it’s just wasting our time.
Did you check?
Or did you just skim through the repository and go “That looks like something, therefore it is what it claims to be”? Because that’s how AI slop works.
Aaand the automatic moderation ate my comment about the moral hazard of propping up potential scammers.
What if OpenBoot but MicroPython?
Can we add a tag for slop so I don’t bother opening the article
opens window in new tab
“The OS… appears to have been created using an LLM”
closes tab unread
… I’m not sure Hackaday really grasps how much those of us who don’t want anything to do with LLMs REALLY don’t want ANYTHING to do with LLMs…
Anyway. The Jupiter ACE failed because it had no colour, no bitmap graphics and only 1KB of program RAM in a marketplace where much more was expected on all of those fronts. The Spectrum would have done just as well with Forth as it did with BASIC – not least because by the time it mattered, people were buying (or persuading their parents to buy) computers they could run games on, and “but I’ll be able to learn a STRUCTURED programming language!” would have been quite a persuasive argument (and just as much of a… well, let’s be kind and call it an aspiration, rather than an intention).
what about snake OS? GitHub – skzidev/snake-os: Snake in an Operating system · GitHub https://share.google/1aB4k9DkQT5V0tLo6