How to vibe an OS without knowing anything (much)

Mikronix is an operating system written by a fleet of language models under agent orchestration. Every line of C was written by a machine. There is no human author behind the code.

Konrad Lother, the project's inventor, had no plan of his own. He did not write the C, he did not design the modules, he did not sketch the architecture in advance. He steers, decides, fixes the hardware, and reads the result to learn from it. The system is his learning instrument, not his engineering product.

This is not a weakness. It is a different way to build.

The method

A kanban board drives the work. Tasks are written to be self-contained: a worker sees nothing but its task -- role, goal, reference files with paths, binding rules, and the verification commands that define "done". Workers run in isolated git worktrees; they never work in the shared checkout.

Five agent personas (pagefault, groff, valgrind, jtag, and one more for the acceptance review) work the board. The controller checks every 15 minutes: it fills free slots, merges pull requests whose delivery contract is met, rescues crashed runs, and writes the journal.

The proof

Build is the proof. Not a compile, not a link -- a build that produces a kernel, a boot chain, a rootfs, and a bootable image. A clean compile is not "working". The acceptance triad is:

• it builds,
• it flashes,
• the serial log shows the expected lines.

When a commit ships, the evidence is public: the git log, the boot log, the regression tests. Anyone can verify.

The mistakes

Every commit carries a persona as author. The controller's journal (records what was achieved and what had to be corrected) is in the repository under refs/journal/. Mistakes and their fixes are the best material; they are recorded by name.

Notable lessons: phantom completions (a task reported done with not a single commit -- detected by comparing the branch against main), a config rewrite that silently dropped five worker routes from the inference proxy, the difference between a build that compiles and a system that boots.

The stance

People will say Mikronix was "vibed". They will point to the lack of a human author and say it was "abgekupfert" from the big Unixes. That is honest -- Mikronix builds on NetBSD, 4.4BSD-Lite2, Unix v6, and OpenBSD. But every Unix does that. The BSDs themselves keep SOURCE/ORIGIN blocks; they do not pretend their code was born from a single mind.

Mikronix is proud of its provenance. The code is auditable. The git log is public. The build is the proof.

If you want to read the C, you can. If you want to trust the build, you can too.

See references for the full list of sources and standards Mikronix builds on.