Humbug is a project that explores building a secure and reliable operating system for human/AI collaboration.
Traditional operating systems are designed to securely use and share hardware resources. The best ones attempt to protect users from buggy and malicious software. The weakest link in this security chain is the human user, who can be tricked into running unsafe software or leaking access to sensitive data.
The introduction of AI suddenly makes this a lot more complicated. Our default model of the last few decades was an unpredictable human interacting with what should be a predictable system. With AI participant our unpredictable human is suddenly dealing with an equally unpredictable AI too.
We need to rethink our approach to security, privacy, and trust.
Background
Humbug was started as a project to build tools that would let me explore and develop legacy codebases, but has since evolved into a more general purpose platform. "Traditional" operating systems I've worked on, or designed, were able to draw on significant research from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but AI changes the game.
The blog post, "A path to an AI operating system" outlines some of my thoughts on why AI changes many long-standing assumptions.
Design philosophy
Humbug is designed to offer AIs a first class experience, while still catering to the needs of human users. The UI is designed to allow both humans and AIs to interact with it, allowing for a more collaborative experience.
As current LLMs are still prone to making serious mistakes, Humbug is designed to operate with a human in the loop. Wherever potentially dangerous operations are performed, the human is consulted for approval, and the tool calling approvals cannot be bypassed.
For example, an AI may read a file, but cannot write to it without human approval. An AI may read a terminal window, but cannot type into it without human approval.
A key aspect of this type of system is the ability for the AI to make use of tools. Humbug's tool system is designed to provdide a range of orthogonal tools that can be combined to perform complex tasks. Tools are designed with composability in mind, allowing AIs to build complex workflows from simple building blocks.
A major expression of this concept is AIFPL (AI Functional Programming Language). AIFPL is a pure, higher-order, functional programming language designed specifically for AIs to use to perform algorithmic tasks. As it is side-effect free, it is safe for an AI to use without human supervision.
Related projects
Humbug incorporates several other projects I'm working on, including:
More information
You can find out more about the project on GitHub: https://github.com/m6r-ai/humbug.
This site also hosts more information in the blog area. You can also find design notes published since early August 2025 in the notes section.
Source code and binaries
The source code can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/m6r-ai/humbug
MacOS binaries for each release can be found on the GitHub releases page: https://github.com/m6r-ai/humbug/releases.