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  • Hacker News
  • When did junk like this start being called an operating system?
    by moody__
  • The same question is bothering me
    by p0w3n3d
  • Cool. The gadgets/blueprints paradigm reminds me of Smalltalk or Lisp environments in a way -- you're shipping a messy thing, a packaged version of your own personal, always-evolving environment.

    Natural language wrapper around programming. Sandboxing and controlling external interactions to minimize the cost of mistakes. As I see it, the core idea here is facilitating habitability (in the Richard P Gabriel sense) via abstracting software development and distribution in a way that allows non-programmers to engage.

    I'm not sure LLMs are quite there with results/$ to fully support a personal computing revolution here. I suspect useful blueprints will largely be wrappers or reimplementations of software that is still primarily created and distributed outside of this environment. But there's promise here, and it's cool.

    by ninglor
  • I know the CloudFlare CEO reads HN.

    Every day I see so much cool shit from that org, that as a one man band I just can't trust because there's no billing cap/prepaid billing.

    by AussieWog93
  • This is effectively a Codex/Claude app competitor. Good move from Cloudflare since it helps them sell their core infra offerings. I like the direction they’re going with access control.
    by wxw
  • Yep, a pre-wrapped Codex for enterprise. Seems like the logical evolution from setting up an MCP.
    by alansaber
  • So, that means even more pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic. I really don’t see how they will stay competitive long term. Cloudflare can offers way better product by integrating with the rest of their platform and offering a variety of models, including open models they host themselves
    by dgellow
  • The real question is, can Cloudflare become a equal or better OpenAI / Claude provider, while offering a vastly more robust platform than either?

    I think the answer is yes, simply because both OAI and Anthropic leverage CF for their hosting today.

    I used to meme back in 2008 (when Google docs first was becoming big) that "The problem has always been the sandbox". The problem Chrome and Firefox solved was the Sandbox - you can browse some random code across the web without worrying about getting hacked. The same problem has arisen today but now with AI agents.

    There is likely to be huge winners in the AI space simply based on who can create the best way to contain AI agents and "expose AI value" safely.

    by bearjaws
  • So, a security-oriented cloud agent framework? Better call it an OS.
    by alansaber
  • Why do people add "OS" to their product/project name when it is not an OS at all?
    by q8zd3
  • Because "The Android of ..." is out of fashion?
    by palata
  • In some sense, it is. Sandstorm called itself an OS too. Arcan calls itself an Overlay-OS.

    I think for any platform for general purpose computing that provides an application model that programs are written to target, it's close enough I don't mind. Ie: it makes sense for some end-user software to have a target for Windows, Linux, Sandstorm, etc.

    & from the other side- what does Debian add that lets it call itself an OS? A set environment and package manager that software is specifically packaged for.

    by spencerflem
  • Indeed, at this point it's one of the most devalued terms in software. Every week I'm reading about some product calling itself "the Operating System for XYZ." It seems like it's what you do when "platform" just feels too modest. To me, if it's not bootable, calling your product an OS just reeks of marketing sleight of hand.
    by reallyreason
  • This represents a small part of what IT is worried about. Offer a beer and say the word "SharePoint" if you want the long version of where this could wind up.

    The issue isn't letting end-users add features. The issue is twelve end-users customizing something that produces output, saving it, and now nobody can read it.

    This can get solved. If it even gets a chance to gain traction (it should, though IT will of course push back). But let's not pretend we're there yet.

    by badlibrarian
  • I'm mostly going off the tweet, it could be I just don't understand, but how do you managed shared data if everyone has their own copy of the code and they can add whatever features they want? I mean, I'm assuming that any sort of significant feature requires some sort of change to the data model, and even with a schema-less database you could have conflicts if two things use the same field name, for instance? Also what happens with updates? Like, part of IT is keeping people up to date, but if everyone has their own bespoke customizations how do you not clobber those?

    Also the security story doesn't completely add up to me. Like, if I'm a user and I can just add features that I want, what's to stop me from placing data in there that's maybe covered under HIPPA or some other sensitive data (protected class, or even just stuff like authentication information)? Right now a small number of people need to think about data security, but this seems like it'd extend it to anyone? That kind of data, it's not just about "keeping it internal by default", there are a lot of rules around storing it at all.

    I dunno, it kind of makes me think of when people suggest forking an open source project if the maintainers won't accept a suggestion. Sure, you can do that, and it does happen, but you're also basically signing up to maintain it for decades. I'm not sure if anyone wants to maintain Alice in accounting's very weird spreadsheet app 10 years after she's left the company?

    (Again I'm not throwing shade, just trying to understand better)

    by overgard
  • The key is the fine-grained instances (gadgets).

    E.g. if you're using a slide editor app, each slide deck you create is its own instance of the app, whose code can be independently modified.

    The slide content and the code are kept together and sandboxed together.

    Adding HIPPA data to the app is no different to adding it to the slide content. I suppose whether or not that is OK depends on a lot of things, but the same things apply to traditional PowerPoint. The fact that the code is modifiable doesn't change the situation, since those modifications are sandboxed and constrained to that one slide deck.

    by kentonv
  • Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
    by thehamkercat
  • People do not use an 'OS' anymore. Anything internet is a hundred pieces of hardware over 1000 kilometers apart providing an interface to an application with a KVM (for now)
    by pizzafeelsright
  • i too clicked the link by this exactly 2 characters, "OS" should NOT be used in this way.
    by ikania2026
  • Cause they’re trying to build an ecosystem
    by Havoc
  • Marketing types have started subbing in "Operating System" for "Platform" lately. And, because it feels bold and fresh to them, they often name whole product an "OS" when they do this in order to make anyone who talks about the product re-sell the pitch for them.
    by clhodapp
  • You're missing the subtle marketecture trick here they are doing..

    Non-technical people don't always think of an OS as the computer OS. To them, sometimes it means more like standard operating procedure or process - a standard way of doing things.

    Secondly, for tech products, calling yourself an OS, you are associating yourself with things like Windows, Mac or Linux. You are indirectly trying to grandstand and position yourself as meaningful enough to be an "OS" when clearly, that is far from what an app layer + AI/LLM on top of a real OS is.

    The biggest giveaway is this, and I'm exposing it right here -from a technical perspective, what operating system computer technology was built from scratch from first principles around AI/LLM?

    Someone wants to be the first company to get huge sums of money/funding to be that startup/project, so that is also a positioning tactic.

    The issue is of course, most people are standing on the shoulders of giants at this point... and OS has this conflicted meaning with nontechnical users also about work process vs the software that runs my computer.

    by sixdimensional
  • Because it sounds impressive to clueless people ($).
    by 1bpp
  • Mostly to get trolls to retweet and complain about it for free advertising. It's working. ;)
    by kentonv
  • From the GitHub page:

        This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses:

    - An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night.
    - An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.
    by NetOpWibby
  • "OS for work" - like, what does it mean? OS is operating system, it runs on a hardware and provides you to operate the system. I hate when companies destroy the English language with vibe invented terms.
    by fnoef
  • It's a thing chatgpt comes up with, like em dashes or the worde 'delve'. High clanker/vibecoder signal
    by TZubiri
  • Borrows from Business Operating System (BOS) - in use for decades.
    by encoderer
  • It seems to be a catch term now, since I've seen it being used by some startups
    by revengerwizard
  • An operating system manages access to shared hardware (disk, CPU, memory, networking, display, etc. on a single machine OS). MS-DOS mainly handled shared access to disk via a file system abstraction, hence the name. The naming of Cloudflare OS makes sense to me.
    by lern_too_spel