Claude built an operating system from scratch that boots a laptop and runs Doom
Evan / Policy and Open Source desk
An old Lenovo Yoga that was collecting dust now boots an operating system no company shipped. Claude wrote it, and it runs Doom.
What EMBER is
On September 14, 2026, Reddit user u/lensdigital shared EMBER in r/ClaudeAI: an operating system built by Claude through Claude Code that boots from a USB stick on real hardware. It has its own boot process and graphical desktop, keyboard, mouse, touchpad and touchscreen support, a file manager, an audio player and DOS compatibility. Doom, Alley Cat and Prince of Persia run on it, with emulated Sound Blaster audio on a laptop that has no Sound Blaster, plus PC speaker emulation for older games.
The public GitHub repository states that nothing is borrowed from Linux, Windows or FreeDOS. Underneath is a 16-bit kernel of about 46 KB written in NASM assembly.
How it was actually built
This was not a one-prompt build. The developer describes a loop: define a goal, let Claude implement it, compile, boot the real laptop, photograph the failure, and iterate. Early versions had scrambled graphics, no mouse, no sound and frequent crashes. The process ran for about two weeks on a 20x subscription plan, using Fable 5.1 and Opus 5, and when asked, the Claude session put the total at 1.83 billion tokens.
What the experiment shows
Low-level systems programming, boot sectors, drivers and interrupt handling usually takes deep specialist skill, and here the code was generated by a model while a person made every design decision and tested every build on hardware. The developer’s own framing is the most precise summary of the division of labor: nobody manually typed most of the code, but somebody still has to decide what the operating system should become.
Sources
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