LLMs as Operating Systems

LLMs as Operating Systems

The next wave of software treats LLMs as first-class citizens, not as just AI features added onto existing products.

You build apps on top of operating systems like Windows or Android, you don’t build Windows into your app. LLMs have become the platform now.

Cursor rebuilt their entire IDE with the chat window permanently visible on the right side, handling everything from planning, writing, debugging to deploying code. Perplexity started fresh and reimagined search as a conversation instead of a list of links. Warp threw out decades of terminal design and built it new with AI baked into every interaction.

These are not AI features added on top of existing tools, but entire products reimagined with AI as the foundation.

When intelligence is the foundation, you rethink how people interact with your software, what the interface looks like, which workflows make sense, what becomes possible that wasn’t before.

We’re still early in figuring this out, but you can already see the difference between apps that added AI and apps that were built on it. The next few years will have more breakout products built entirely on the LLM OS.