IMO, an agentic operating system should be not only about "integrating the agent everywhere" but also about providing the compartimentalization and tools to allow working safely with agents when they can reach into every part of the system. It should allow to easily extend the system safely.
I also built an agentic OS but the underlying system is very different based on a custom actor runtime with capabilities and a way to arbitrarily create and compose restricted capabilities.
The idea is that you can sculpt the OS to your needs using agents and fully restrict what they can or can't do.
The core is also I think kind of interesting because at it's core it's an actor runtime, where each program receives and sends messages, and only when processing a message they use memory. Each program has managed persistent state as well. So it's very easy to create actors that persist data and you can have millions of them without using a lot of resources.
> IMO, an agentic operating system should be not only about "integrating the agent everywhere" but also about providing the compartimentalization and tools to allow working safely with agents when they can reach into every part of the system. It should allow to easily extend the system safely.
Right, but that's also a contradiction. An "agentic" OS is most interesting to the average AI enthusiast if it can, essentially, be your executive assistant: shop for you, book travel for you, manage your agenda, sort through your emails, do your taxes, and so on - possibly including anticipating your needs before you articulate them. That requires human-equivalent access, more or less.
Most people also don't need it - really, most lives are not that complicated - but the allure of your own computerized EA is undeniable. It's your personal servant, how cool is that.
The safe and principled way to use agents is to scope permissions appropriately, restrict them to narrowly-defined tasks, etc, but that also makes the technology a lot more boring. And these silos are very difficult to build when you're interacting with third-party services anyway.
You could as well argue that vibecoding is wrong and that there are principled ways to use agents for precisely-scoped, restricted tasks. Sure, but the entire SF Bay Area is vibecoding now, and if something breaks or gets hacked, that's just the cost of business.
I disagree they are fundamentally at odds. The design I'm exploring with capabilities means that if you want you can do all of those things, but you can also scope them. An actor can create another actor and pass the capability or restrict it further. Imagine something like codemode with capabilities, where you want your agent to be able to shop for you. You ask your OS agent, it creates a couple different actors, one maybe manages your money, with limits you can set. Only that actor can do that. Another gets a restricted HTTP client only for those shops you whitelist.
Then a third is an agentic actor that gets access to those other two. That one then has access to two things:
* HTTP requests to specific websites
* A limited way to use money
Since you can compose the primitives to limit the impact of any agent doing stupid shit you can trust it more to shop for you or book travel for you.
Of course it's more friction, but you can also choose how involved are you. You can potentially trust your coding agent to do most of it and once done everything that can be deterministic is deterministic, and only agents come in for the non-determinism and adaptability.
As the system evolve you have a library of actors that act as restricted capabilities, and an agent cannot create them out of thin air.
The question most of us will have is: what does having the agent at the OS level get you that you can't get through a user space app? "It does the work through the same operations as your keyboard and mouse" makes it sound like garden-variety computer-use rather than something more fundamental. I would expect an agent-oriented OS to be built around something like Apple's App Intents as an atomic component.
Pretty cool. I'd prefer it more as a desktop environment though that I can run alongside others, like I have Kubuntu which uses KDE as default DE, and also LxQT as an alternative.
Yes, of course it works! I'll be posting new videos soon. You can also try it yourself. Deepgram offers $200 in free credits when you sign up, so you can test it at no cost. Additionally, you can use the operating system without the agent.
IMO, an agentic operating system should be not only about "integrating the agent everywhere" but also about providing the compartimentalization and tools to allow working safely with agents when they can reach into every part of the system. It should allow to easily extend the system safely.
I also built an agentic OS but the underlying system is very different based on a custom actor runtime with capabilities and a way to arbitrarily create and compose restricted capabilities.
The idea is that you can sculpt the OS to your needs using agents and fully restrict what they can or can't do.
The core is also I think kind of interesting because at it's core it's an actor runtime, where each program receives and sends messages, and only when processing a message they use memory. Each program has managed persistent state as well. So it's very easy to create actors that persist data and you can have millions of them without using a lot of resources.
> IMO, an agentic operating system should be not only about "integrating the agent everywhere" but also about providing the compartimentalization and tools to allow working safely with agents when they can reach into every part of the system. It should allow to easily extend the system safely.
Right, but that's also a contradiction. An "agentic" OS is most interesting to the average AI enthusiast if it can, essentially, be your executive assistant: shop for you, book travel for you, manage your agenda, sort through your emails, do your taxes, and so on - possibly including anticipating your needs before you articulate them. That requires human-equivalent access, more or less.
Most people also don't need it - really, most lives are not that complicated - but the allure of your own computerized EA is undeniable. It's your personal servant, how cool is that.
The safe and principled way to use agents is to scope permissions appropriately, restrict them to narrowly-defined tasks, etc, but that also makes the technology a lot more boring. And these silos are very difficult to build when you're interacting with third-party services anyway.
You could as well argue that vibecoding is wrong and that there are principled ways to use agents for precisely-scoped, restricted tasks. Sure, but the entire SF Bay Area is vibecoding now, and if something breaks or gets hacked, that's just the cost of business.
I disagree they are fundamentally at odds. The design I'm exploring with capabilities means that if you want you can do all of those things, but you can also scope them. An actor can create another actor and pass the capability or restrict it further. Imagine something like codemode with capabilities, where you want your agent to be able to shop for you. You ask your OS agent, it creates a couple different actors, one maybe manages your money, with limits you can set. Only that actor can do that. Another gets a restricted HTTP client only for those shops you whitelist.
Then a third is an agentic actor that gets access to those other two. That one then has access to two things:
* HTTP requests to specific websites * A limited way to use money
Since you can compose the primitives to limit the impact of any agent doing stupid shit you can trust it more to shop for you or book travel for you.
Of course it's more friction, but you can also choose how involved are you. You can potentially trust your coding agent to do most of it and once done everything that can be deterministic is deterministic, and only agents come in for the non-determinism and adaptability.
As the system evolve you have a library of actors that act as restricted capabilities, and an agent cannot create them out of thin air.
That's a false dichotomy. An AI assistant doesn't have to be unrestricted and monolithic.
The question most of us will have is: what does having the agent at the OS level get you that you can't get through a user space app? "It does the work through the same operations as your keyboard and mouse" makes it sound like garden-variety computer-use rather than something more fundamental. I would expect an agent-oriented OS to be built around something like Apple's App Intents as an atomic component.
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Pretty cool. I'd prefer it more as a desktop environment though that I can run alongside others, like I have Kubuntu which uses KDE as default DE, and also LxQT as an alternative.
What does this do that giving the agent a wayland session in Linux doesn't?
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Interesting idea, very ambitious.
Does it actually work? I don't think anyone is going to sign up for DeepGram just to test this out.
Yes, of course it works! I'll be posting new videos soon. You can also try it yourself. Deepgram offers $200 in free credits when you sign up, so you can test it at no cost. Additionally, you can use the operating system without the agent.
I hope this "custom OS" isn't actually just a Linux port made via burning tokens: https://github.com/vahmoh25/Veda/commit/982835336fedc0f25427...
nice one
Thanks!