HTMLAIOS

A fake operating system where every screen is generated live by an LLM.

There's no pre-built UI. Every desktop, terminal, file manager window, and settings panel is HTML generated on the fly by a language model, in response to whatever you just clicked or typed. Three things are actually real and persistent across screens:

• a small in-memory filesystem (a JS object of path → content)
• a settings/state object (theme color, scanlines, etc.)
• real web search results, when the model decides an action calls for one

Everything else — every window, icon, error message, and "crash" — is re-hallucinated from scratch on each interaction.

How it works

1. Open index.html in a browser and paste in your own API key (OpenRouter or direct Anthropic).
2. Every click inside the OS sends an action description (e.g. "open terminal", "delete file notes.txt") up to a small React app wrapping the OS.
3. That app sends the model the current screen's HTML, the settings state, and the full filesystem, and asks for four blocks back: updated state, filesystem operations (fsops), an optional search request, and the next screen's html.
4. If the model asks for a real search, it's actually run (via OpenRouter's web plugin, or Anthropic's hosted web search tool), and the model is called again with genuine results to render.
5. The generated screen is rendered inside a sandboxed iframe (sandbox="allow-scripts", no same-origin access).

No backend, no build step — it's a single self-contained HTML file.

Usage

Just open index.html in any modern browser. You'll need an API key from one of:

• OpenRouter — recommended, since it supports browser-side calls directly
• Anthropic — direct calls from a browser will likely hit a CORS error unless you're using a proxy, since the Anthropic API doesn't enable CORS for browser requests

Your API key is kept in browser memory only for the current session. It is never written to disk, sent to any server other than the provider you chose, or persisted anywhere.

Notes

• Expect occasional weirdness — broken layouts, inconsistent state, in-universe "crash" messages — that's the nature of a UI that's reconstructed from scratch every time rather than a real, stable program.
• Some embedded external sites/images may fail to load if they block iframe embedding (X-Frame-Options / CSP).
• API usage is billed by whichever provider's key you supply; this project does not include or proxy any keys of its own.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.