Omarchy, the Agentic OS Built for AI Agents

Nate B. Jones (0:00)

Today, I want to talk about time travel. Now, stay with me. Every operating system you have ever used is a pile of decisions someone else made, years before you sat down to it. Where do the notification goes? What opens on startup? What are you allowed to change? All of those decisions are decisions you have been living with since long before the age of AI.

That is changing. Omarchy is a Linux desktop from DHH, and it's built so you can point an AI agent at your own OS and go back in time and change those decisions. That's the future. Customizing your existing OS so it works for you. And I mean your existing OS. You might think, oh, Nate needs me to install Linux. I do not. Part of this video is helping you take your current Mac, your current Windows and having the same conversation. And here's an example that really drives this home for me. A dad named Yankees wanted to be able to set screen time for each of his kids differently. I get it. I'm a dad. I have multiple kids. They need different screen time. Now, in his case, one of his kids needs a computer that locks when the child's time runs out, and they can only earn more time by doing math, multiplication exercise. Another child needs agreements. And so in this case, the screen doesn't have locks, it doesn't have rewards. Instead, they are recording a contract or agreement between the parents and the child, and that shapes screen time. Now, as a dad, I can see why you want this to happen, right? You want to be able to create something that works for a particular child without assuming that your approach to parenting works for everybody else, or even works for all of your kids in the same way. We're living in a world now where the audience for a change like that can be just one person. The audience for a change like that can be just you. I think a lot of people are still going to lean into defaults with computers because computers take effort to modify.

You have to open the computer and you have to actually make an intentional change. And a lot of us want to open the computer and get on with our day. We don't want to make the effort to change, and it's not reasonable to expect the whole world to do that. Open source software has given people permission to modify their computers for a very, very long time. I was a Linux nerd a long, long time ago. But permission was not the only obstacle.

You also had to understand the system, find the relevant coder setting, make the changes, and figure out whether they broke something else when you made them. I remembered that when I was writing drivers. Now, an agent can help with that work. The question is how well the environment supports an agent working at that level in the computer. Omarchy is a Linux desktop assembled by David Heinemeyer Hansen, or DHH, who is the original creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37Signals. It comes with applications, shortcuts, window management and a visual design already selected. You get a coherent starting point and ways to change that when you want something different, as I shared at the top in that story about Dad. Omarchy 4, called Quattro, arrived on August 14th. It brings the bar, the launcher, notification, other desktop controls all together in one programmable system called QuickShell. It also adds a plugin system and easier access to your chosen coding agent.

More of the desktop is organized for changes people can make and share, and the home page now offers both Mac and Windows trials, so you can explore it on the computer you already own without making a giant commitment to uninstall your operating system. So my first useful experience would be playing with presentation. Change the window tiling. Make it what you want. Keep a copy of the current setting. Ask the agent to change how windows appear, and then test that it works, and then have the agent undo it. That gives you the full experience of asking for something personal and the way your computer presents itself, using the results, and then going back to the beginning. Well, the story starts with something really ordinary. If we're talking about windows, let's say you want the browser to always appear on the right side of your screen, and your note's always on the left side of your screen, and you want a particular application to open up only on your second screen. The agent needs to find all of the settings that control all of that behavior on a traditional computer, whether they exist or not. It needs to understand the format you're looking for. It needs a way to apply the change, which it doesn't always have, and it needs feedback to tell whether it worked.