Nicolás Wolovick

In 11 days, I built a new Linux-compatible operating system kernel that boots Rocky Linux 10 with systemd, all using Human-Directed Agentic Engineering (HDAE). I call it Ginux. It is an independent, Rust-first x86-64 kernel (not a Linux fork) with its own memory management, boot process, scheduler, process model, filesystems, networking, devices, and Linux compatibility layer. The real experiment was the development method and testing to see if AI can do this. HDAE combines human-defined architecture, constraints, milestones, and acceptance criteria with an AI agent that implements, tests, diagnoses, and iterates. One persistent Codex task using GPT-5.6 Sol produced approximately 139,000 retained lines of implementation and test code. Ginux is a research prototype, not a production kernel or Linux replacement. The larger lesson is that AI can generate complex systems software, but compatibility, security, hardware support, standards, community, and long-term maintenance remain the real moat. Paper: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23682… Source: github.com/gmkurtzer/ginux