The follow-up to The Framebuffer People. Half the angry comments asked the same question underneath the anger: okay, so what should I build? Here is the long answer. Eleven rules for building an operating system that teaches you something, with your dignity still attached at the end.
One vain question to ChatGPT became four months, $8,000, and 20,000 commits of an operating system that only loved one ThinkPad. Then came the autopsy: borrowed kernels, erased attribution, and a filesystem I reinvented years after Matthew Dillon shipped HAMMER. From SeurOS to GaslightOS, my Linux phone experiment with voice control and three hours of battery life, this is how I learned that generating code is not authorship, booting is not proof, and the reading is the work.
I spent two months cloning almost every OS posted to r/osdev and running the code through an analyzer. Almost everything was a reskin of a reskin of Linux, and almost nothing boots on real hardware. Then I said so in public, and 137 comments taught me more about the AI hobby economy than the code did.