Pavan Davuluri, the president of Windows and devices at Microsoft, recently took to X to share their feelings on the future of the OS (as spotted by Tom’s Hardware). “Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere.”
If that phrase reads to you like someone has thrown a dart at a board filled with LinkedIn buzzwords, you’re not alone. Effectively, an agentic AI is one that can run autonomously, without the need to check back in on each step of the process.
If you ask a standard non-agentic AI to make you a poem, it can. If you ask that same AI to set up supply chains, adjusting stock and employees in real-time, based on information fed to it, it can’t do it .
So, in this sense, Windows as an agentic AI is one that is designed to run automations daily to lighten the productivity load. However, I can’t help but wonder who wants that out of their OS?
I have used a lot of terrible GUIs in my day, for sure. A lot of nonsense that makes me really want some of those nicer TUIs, for sure. My issue is with the programs that don’t tell you what the options are and you just have to know the right commands and switches, not the nice interfaces that do the best they can with the technology and give you a list of options and a relatively simple way to select one. Unfortunately, that first type is the vast majority of stuff that you have to use a terminal for in the first place. And if similar programs with a nicer terminal interface exist, finding them is the exact same discoverability problem as figuring out the commands to use, because generally you have either a popular but not great GUI for it, findable via searching online and seeing people recommend it on a tech forum and then having to find it, or people who go on and on that it doesn’t need a better interface, just look up the commands whenever you need to use it (and the oddball CLI junkies who think memorizing all the commands you often need is a mark of competency in computer usage, and easier interfaces were a mistake that lets idiots use computers). And I find even a terrible GUI less annoying than having to do that every time and flip between the terminal window and a web browser.
when you run into this experience, remember that the terminal is the kitchen and the gui is the dining room. Your implements, equipment and tools are in the directories in your $PATH, which will print them out if you type it. Each one has its instructions accessible with either the info, man, -h or help commands.