It's a shame because DHH seems to be going fully agentic (or at least that's his public stance), so no idea why he isn't rolling a proper distro. Looking at his repo it's just pure shell scripts (why?) and using prebuilt software. He could have rolled a custom renderer + pipeline + other software needed to make a distro work (ie a modern KDE).
Go ahead and do it. Would love to see an improved Linux rewritten with agents. My personal belief is it would take a long time, lots of money and much human intervention/guidance but if you think they’re capable alone just do it this afternoon and see how it goes.
In all seriousness, if you have the time the money and the inclination, you should give yourself a challenge like this, and try to complete it. It would be an interesting exploration of the limits of current agents. You don't need someone else to do that for you.
Well - yes - I have. And the test came back positive.
But it's always possible I'm just being naive in some way. An external challenge makes it more robust.
I don't think I'd want to do an entire linux distro - it's needlessly large to test the hypothesis - but perhaps there's a part that you think would be an interesting challenge?
