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What is Bed of Roses?

Bed of Roses is an AI-native operating-system layer for macOS. It is built on a single premise: a conversation with an AI should be able to produce durable software and take real action — not just return text.

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The presence

The thing you interact with is the presence: a small orb that floats above your desktop, always on top, draggable anywhere. It has three states you’ll see constantly:
  • Collapsed orb — idle, waiting. Click it to talk.
  • Expanded prompt — a composer where you type (or attach files / screenshots).
  • Thought bubble — while BOR works, a bubble streams its thinking and shows live cards: a code editor filling in, a terminal running a command, a browser session with screenshots, a generated image, a countdown while it waits.
The presence is deliberately ambient. It sits beside your real apps, not in front of them. When it builds you an app, that app opens as its own native Mac window you can dock-tab to, resize, and keep.

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What a “turn” produces

When you ask for something, BOR doesn’t only reply — it can emit any combination of:
  • A spoken answer (<say>) — streamed text in the bubble.
  • An app — a full-screen, stateful application that opens as a Mac window (a calorie tracker, a CRM, a dashboard).
  • A shortcut — a small live interactive card that lives inside the thought bubble (a translator, a Pomodoro timer, a pay button).
  • Files — real source code or documents written to disk.
  • Commands — shell commands actually executed on your machine.
  • A new look — a theme change, a generated wallpaper, new fonts.
  • Actions — clicking in another app, opening a URL in a browser, scheduling a job, sending a notification.
Each of these is a tool call in BOR’s XML protocol. See The protocol.

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Apps vs. shortcuts vs. real projects

This distinction matters and BOR enforces it:
  • App (<create_app>) — a BOR-internal surface that opens as its own Mac window. Long-lived, multi-screen, the kind of thing you return to.
  • Shortcut (<create_shortcut>) — a BOR-internal surface that renders as a sandboxed iframe card inside the bubble. Conversation-adjacent, small, stateful.
  • Real project — when you ask BOR to “build a React landing page” or “fix the bug in my repo”, that is not a BOR app. BOR writes real code to a workspace, runs the dev server, and previews it in the browser. See Apps for how BOR chooses.

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Who it’s for

  • People who want an AI that does things on their Mac, not just chats.
  • Developers who want a conversational way to scaffold, run, and preview real projects.
  • Anyone who wants a customizable, ambient assistant that remembers them and grows with use.

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What it is not

  • It is not a VSCode extension (though it can write and run code like one).
  • It is not locked to a single AI vendor — you bring your own provider, or use BOR credits.
  • It is not a cloud service that owns your data. Everything generated lives on your disk and is yours.

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