Unix, for a new kind of inhabitant.

BentOS is a kernel and a userland, installed onto the operating system you already run — the way GNU/Linux is a kernel plus a userland, except this one is additive and you keep your machine. It holds external capability as devices: a model is a device path, opened by name, and the credential lives in the driver where your program cannot reach it. Durable state is a Git repository the platform installs, addresses and versions without ever reading inside it.

An application is roughly 99% assembly, and the industry’s answer to that is the framework — which composes inside one language, so nothing it builds can be reused by anyone standing one language over, and the duplication it promised to kill multiplies once per language and once per framework. Drop the joint beneath the language and the units become processes and system services. The blocks stop being language-bound, the shared infrastructure lives once instead of inside every app, and the framework is the operating system. That is the thesis, in full.

Inference, before you have a key

The userland ships fixture devices that need no credential, so this runs on a machine that has never seen an API key:

$ llm models
$ echo 'two cities' | llm -d /dev/llm/fixture/two-cities --output-format typed --output-encoding json | chat-render
→ get_weather {"city":"Recife"}
→ get_weather {"city":"Olinda"}

llm opened a device and streamed a typed event stream; chat-render is an ordinary filter that has never heard of a model. Point -d at /dev/llm/openai/gpt-4o-mini and the line is the same line — the vendor is a driver, not an integration. No daemon is running behind any of it: each command is born, does its work, and exits.

The floor

Four primitives, and every one of them is a coordinate the platform understands without understanding your data.

Place — WHERE. A directory declared a space, so that installing something always answers where it landed, and the tree of places is the search path.

Entity — WHO and WHAT. One named thing of your ontology, physically one Git repository, its branches its instances. The RAM is the disk: your object model survives intact while the object becomes durable, addressable and versioned.

Event — WHEN it happened. Publish and subscribe, between parties that need not know one another. Subscribing arms a command line at a coordinate, and the act that lands there runs it — which is what lets a program refuse to exist between events instead of sitting resident.

Process — the unit of business value, composed from the passive three designed.

The full account, including what each primitive is not, is in the primitives, and how you write software over them is the model.

Install

Two acts. The first brings bentos itself; the second brings the rest of the userland into ~/.bentos/bin, which the bootstrap will tell you to put on your PATH if it is not there already.

macOS and Linux install from published releases today. Windows executables are built and published for every coreutil, but there is no published installation path for them yet — no bootstrap script ships in a release, so there is nothing honest to copy on that platform. No date is being promised.

Where this goes

The platform exists so that a different kind of product can exist above it: a computer you talk to, that does your computer things for you, because the machine that knows how to operate the computer is the computer. That is HumanOS — in construction, and the one place on this site with a waiting list.

What is real

Every claim on this site carries its grade, and status is the whole table: what runs and was seen running, what is designed and not built, what is still an open question. The platform is open source under MIT — the kernel, the userland, the ABI, the driver SDK, and a driver per vendor beneath each subsystem — and it is published from github.com/cafe01/bentos-userland, which is where the releases are cut. Where to start contributing is its own page.