The funniest insight from Microsoft Build 2026 – Vibe OS

Steve Sanderson from GitHub demoed a pet project of his, VibeOS, at Microsoft Build 2026. On the surface, it looks like an operating system, complete with Notepad, Calculator, a browser, and even apps being created on the fly and launching on demand. Except none of it is real.

There is no code underneath. The AI is generating the entire interface in real time, moment by moment, as you interact with it. He calls it hallucinating, which is both accurate and funny.

I watched this with a big smile on my face. If you work with Generative AI or are building products in an AI era, this 11-minute video is genuinely worth your time.

But it also made me stop and think.

The underlying idea is worth sitting with. LLMs are generating code on the fly, HTML and JS in this case, and offloading execution to actual code rather than running every step inside the model and burning tokens unnecessarily. That separation matters. It is a pattern I expect to see show up more seriously across software, especially enterprise software. Even Microsoft releasing a framework for this at next year’s Build would not surprise me at all. Interestingly, this also resonated with something Sridhar Vembu spoke about recently at Zoholics 2026.

VibeOS is obviously not the OS you want running your business. But a joke demo that leaves you thinking is probably the best kind. Exciting times to be a software engineer.