A fully hallucinated operating system for macOS, inspired by Steve Sanderson's vibeOS from BUILD 2026.
The desktop shell is real and local (menu bar, dock, draggable windows, menus — all instant, zero API calls). The apps are not: each app window is hallucinated by Claude as a self-contained interactive HTML mini-app running in a sandboxed iframe. Claude writes working JavaScript on the fly, so a calculator actually computes locally; only actions that need fresh imagination (navigating the fake Safari, etc.) trigger a regeneration. Opened apps are cached, so reopening is instant.
- macOS 13+
- Swift toolchain (Xcode or Command Line Tools:
xcode-select --install
) - An Anthropic API key ( https://console.anthropic.com)
make run # build & launch
make app # build WibeOS.app, then: open WibeOS.app
On first launch it asks for your API key (stored in the app's preferences;
or set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
in the environment instead).
The dock has an App Store stocked entirely with apps invented for whoever is logged in — Get installs them to the dock permanently (per persona; right-click a dock icon to remove). On first login each persona also gets a full OS theme hallucinated for them — wallpaper, accent, menu bar, dock, window chrome, fonts — and apps are told the accent/dark-mode so they match.
Boot lands on a login screen. Who you log in as changes everything: the persona is injected into every hallucination, so Grandma's Mail is chain letters in giant fonts while the hacker kid's whole machine is neon-on-black 1998. Each persona gets its own app cache. Click + to invent new personas ("a medieval wizard discovering computers"); right-click an avatar to remove it. Log out via the menu.
- Click dock icons to "launch" apps — you watch the HTML stream by as Claude hallucinates the app, then it becomes real(ish). Click ✨ to imagine any app.
- Option-click a dock icon (or View → Re-imagine) to force a fresh hallucination instead of the cached version.
- Menu bar, window dragging/minimize/zoom, Cmd+W close — all local and instant.
Cmd+R
reboots.Cmd+Ctrl+F
for full screen — recommended for the illusion.- Right-click → Inspect Element works for debugging the generated HTML.
- Camera/photo-booth apps use your real webcam (macOS will ask once). For the
permission prompt to be attributed correctly, run as a bundle:
make app
thenopen WibeOS.app
— withmake run
the prompt belongs to your terminal.
Persistent cache: each app is hallucinated once, then stored in~/Library/Application Support/wibeOS/cache
— reopening is instant, even across reboots. Option-click a dock icon or View → Re-imagine to regenerate.Prefetch: at boot, the dock apps are pre-hallucinated in the background (2 at a time), so most apps are ready before you click. Disable withWIBEOS_PREFETCH=0
(first boot prefetch costs roughly 8 app generations).Patch updates: data-wibe actions (browser navigation, opening an email…) return only the changed region as<wibe-patch select="…">
blocks instead of the whole app — a fraction of the tokens, applied live without remounting.Prompt caching: the system prompt is cached server-side across calls.** Model**: defaults toclaude-haiku-4-5-20251001
(fast). For fancier apps:WIBEOS_MODEL=claude-sonnet-4-6 make run
.
- System prompt: edit
systemPrompt
inSources/WibeOS/AppDelegate.swift
to change the OS's personality, default dock, look, etc.
open app ─▶ shell asks Claude for ONE self-contained HTML app (streamed)
─▶ injected bridge script added, mounted in sandboxed <iframe>
─▶ app runs locally (its own JS) — most clicks cost nothing
─▶ controls marked data-wibe / data-wibe-enter round-trip to Claude
for fresh hallucinated content (whole-window re-render)
Each window keeps its own small conversation history (creation pair + last 6 messages), so updates stay consistent and cheap. The Swift layer is a stateless streaming proxy to the Anthropic API.
Only app generation and data-wibe actions cost tokens; everything else is local.