Windows has never felt more archaic than now. I can't imagine trying to do work on a Windows machine in the age of LLMs.

If there is anything that LLMs are rock solid at these days, it's unix terminal usage.

They're also great at powershell, you just need to tell it to do so. sh is neat but it's 55 years old, there are newer and better shell environment concepts out there and the robots can handle them well too, try it some time!

PowerShell unfortunately just isn't that first-class, even on Windows. You'll inevitably discover, if you do this, that certain things simply can't be automated via PowerShell, that some PowerShell modules wrap or lag behind older Windows CLI tools, that various things you want to do still require manual registry hacks, etc.

Try starting from a blank slate Windows machine and making a commitment to only changing settings via PowerShell, and ideally only declaring them using DSC. You'll soon discover settings where the best you can do is snapshot the registry, change a setting in the GUI, snapshot the registry again, then take a diff so you can write the registry change into your PowerShell automation. If you're on a corporate machine, you'll also likely find many corners of PowerShell that you need closed off to you, anyway.

At the end of the day, Windows is not friendly to automation because it's not CLI-first (not culturally and not technically).

Your argument is directed at Windows, not PowerShell. The shell is just a shell, if a certain thing you're looking to configure doesn't have an easy cmdlet, that doesn't mean powershell is bad, just that MS didn't give you the easy button. Similar to many unix tools, some of what you need to interact with has a dedicated CLI, other things have you poking at the configuration database directly (ini or yaml or whatever for unix, registry for windows).

If you don't like the Windows style of configuration, run powershell on linux - it's awesome there too!

I'm not sure why reading and writing the registry is considered a bad interface for programmatic system administration.

I realize text files can be processed by utilities for working with text files. And text files can be read by humans without any tools, and in that sense are rather universal.

I wonder what I'm missing.

I'd go so far as to think an OS that had a database at its core, or perhaps a persistent lisp would be even more programmable and legible.

Maybe better tools for dealing with structured data would help this?

How do you work on Windows in the age of LLMs?

That’s easy: you activate WSL and then ask the LLM how to get networking and stuff working since they changed it with WSL2. You need a config file flag to setup network mirroring now.

Ironically, I feel like LLMs have really unlocked Windows work since they all know how to use Powershell and all the weird Windows commands/hacks that you otherwise either wouldn't even know about, or would have to Google every time.

I used to hate working in Windows, but now it feels roughly comparable to Mac (though at the risk of inciting an OS war, I do feel like Linux still beats both out...)

I totally agree. Powershell is a bit cryptic but it's really powerful especially on Windows. LLMs have smoothed out the learning curve.

Mac Neo can be had for $600 now, and it runs Codex incredibly well!

But even on the Windows machine, if you Tailscale into a free tier VM for the workloads, you'd probably have a much better time.

Just leave Codex itself on your machine, if you set up computer use it will happily set up all of this for you while you have lunch.

Do you have any tips for running Codex on the Macbook Neo? Have you changed any setting? On mine, it stutters on every single chat, and I don't even have any plugins installed.

Are you on the recent update that handles long chat sessions much better? That made a big difference. Biasing towards lightweight and fast tool alternatives (uv over pip, bun over npm, ripgrep over grep, etc).

If that still doesn't resolve it, a free tier VM might be the move. I suspect OpenAI will be bundling some kind of VM with their new Astra release, which Sama said yesterday will be released soon (this week maybe?). If this new model supports much longer running tasks, you'll want a dedicated box that can run 24/7 even when your Neo is closed and asleep anyway.

> Mac Neo can be had for $600 now

Maybe a used one?

https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/ has it for ~$700

Kind of, Swappa has new sealed units with the original warranty (and the warranty timer only starts when you set up the device), but indeed these are resale and not directly from Apple.

One thing I've found - these things are pretty good at troubleshooting desktop problems. If the codex app is running slow, I'll note that it shouldn't be, and also you might get more traction than you'd expect asking the codex app why it's slow.