I asked Claude to build an OS from scratch — days later EMBER boots Doom on real hardware
lensdigital · reddit · 2026-09-14
A Redditor used an old Lenovo Yoga to test how far Claude could go building a DOS-like operating system from scratch that boots from USB on real hardware. The workflow: describe the goal → Claude implements → compile → boot on real hardware → photograph/report failures → iterate.
Days later, the result is EMBER, an open-source OS (GitHub: Made-In-Basement/ember) with:
- its own boot process and graphical environment
- keyboard, USB mouse, touchpad and touchscreen support, on-screen keyboard/tablet mode
- file manager, audio player, resource monitor
- DOS compatibility running Doom, Alley Cat, Prince of Persia and more
- full Sound Blaster and PC speaker emulation, so unmodified DOS games produce sound without special handling
- early progress toward UEFI boot (originally limited to legacy BIOS)
Audio was a highlight: Doom initially ran silent, first worked around by compiling from source to use real audio hardware, then replaced by true Sound Blaster emulation. Performance was another battle — window dragging and audio could hammer the CPU until Claude implemented a memory-caching mechanism that made the GUI fast on the same old hardware.
The author's takeaway: it's not "press button, receive software." Most of his time went into deciding what the system should do, testing on real hardware, finding failures, rejecting bad approaches and steering the next implementation. Nobody hand-typed most of the code, but someone still has to decide what the OS should become. A YouTube video documents the whole journey.
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