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Signals

OS mode — built-in and plug-in

On the macOS app · OS mode preview · ~2 min read

The system comes prepared for you to build your own productivity environment. Not as a blank canvas you have to furnish, but the way an operating system arrives — with the everyday tools already in place, ready for you to arrange around your work. You can time your work. You can keep notes. And in the same window, you can ask the AI to build you an application.

That is OS mode: the deliberate, hands-on side of tunbru-desktop. It is the counterpart to Genie mode — and the two are pointed at different people on purpose.

The rail — everything already there

Down the side sits the rail. Open it and the built-in tools are simply listed, ready. Nothing to install, nothing to configure first.

The OS-mode rail menu, listing the built-in tools
1 · The rail. The built-in productivity tools, already present — the same way an operating system ships with its essentials.

Built-in, then plug-in

The built-in tools cover the work itself: timing a session, holding notes, keeping each session's notes apart. That is the floor, not the ceiling. When you need more, you don't go hunting for software — you ask for it, and the plug-in system extends the set.

Here is the distinction that matters. Every application you have the AI create can be turned into a card — a live one. There is an install wizard already standing behind the scenes, so a standalone app you just requested comes up ready to use. You test the thing you built, live, without going off to run servers or stand up an environment first. The friction that normally sits between "made it" and "using it" isn't there.

Many plug-in cards open at once across the OS-mode workspace
2 · The spread. Many plug-ins open at once. Each began as a request; each became a live card you can actually use — no servers running underneath.

And these don't have to be tools we shipped. Below are two plug-ins that aren't in the bundle — I made them myself: one pulls the transcript out of any YouTube video, the other lets me ask specific questions about what was said. Requested, built, turned into cards, sitting in my workspace next to the built-ins.

Two self-made plug-ins — a YouTube transcript fetcher and a summarize-and-query card — open beside the built-in stopwatch
3 · Your own plug-ins. Not part of the bundle — made to order: transcribe a YouTube video, then query it for the specific answers you're after.

So a person who already has the built-in tools for their day can grow the number of tools around their work — as many as the job calls for — through the plug-in system, without ever leaving the app to make one of them real.

Two modes, one clear line

OS mode is for work: methodical, deliberate, a place you sit down in and build up over sessions. Genie mode is for the person who wants no friction at all — who asks for a thing and receives it, delivered. One is for running the machine; the other is for getting the result and skipping the machine entirely.

We're not going to lay the whole system out here. This is a preview — enough to show what's possible once the platform arrives prepared, like an operating system, with room to grow one plug-in at a time.

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