VibeOSThe fully hallucinated operating system
Recreating VibeOS
VibeOS is a satirical proof-of-concept demoed at Microsoft Build 2026 by Steve Sanderson, the Microsoft engineer known for Blazor.
There is no application code at all. The AI hallucinates the entire UI and behaviour in real time. This page is a recreation built with only Anthropic Claude and caffeinum/vibe-os.
How the recreation works
Sanderson's original ran a real Alpine Linux image in Hyper-V with the GitHub Copilot SDK. This version keeps the idea — no app code; the model draws every app's UI live — but uses a much lighter web stack.
- 1
The kernel is one API route
A single Next.js route, POST /api/hallucinate, asks Claude (claude-sonnet-4-5 via the Anthropic SDK) to act as the "rendering kernel" and stream back one complete HTML document — and nothing else.
- 2
Each window is a sandboxed iframe
The streamed HTML is dropped into a sandboxed iframe, painting progressively as it arrives. The dreamed-up app can't touch the page around it.
- 3
A bridge fakes the behaviour
Claude tags every button and field. Once a frame finishes streaming, a small injected script captures clicks and typing and reports them back to the host.
- 4
Re-dream the next frame
That action is added to the window's history, and the route is called again with the full history. Claude renders the resulting (sometimes wrong) state.
The loop, step by step
- 1You launch an app
- 2POST /api/hallucinate asks Claude for the next frame
- 3The streamed HTML renders in a sandboxed iframe
- 4A bridge captures what you clicked or typed
- ↺That action is added to the history — then it loops back
What it's made of
- Next.js 15 + React 19 on the Bun runtime, in Docker behind Traefik
- Anthropic SDK with a single ANTHROPIC_API_KEY — no Copilot SDK, no VHDX image
- The concept (live-rendered AI apps) borrowed from caffeinum/vibe-os
- A ⌘K launcher and a dock where every icon hallucinates its app