I picked Task Manager ‘to see how ready AI is for primetime… or if it would just degrade to slop’ – OG dev talks to The Reg
Dave Plummer, the former Microsoft engineer who wrote the original 1996 Windows Task Manager, has released new versions of the utility for Windows, Mac and Linux, built largely through AI-assisted "vibe coding." He told The Register the project began as a test of whether AI tools were ready for serious use or would simply produce poor-quality code, and said the results depended heavily on the quality of the prompts and testing involved. The result is a far more capable tool than the original, offering deeper system insight than a simple process-killer, while echoing the look of both the modern Windows 11 Task Manager and vintage media player skins.
The app grew from a 107-page specification Plummer handed to AI coding tool Fable, with a first working version produced after roughly three and a half hours. Rather than using Electron, the team built native interfaces for each platform: Swift on Mac, Direct2D/DirectComposition on Windows, and Qt on Linux, which Plummer said took more effort but delivered better performance. The Windows version reportedly runs at around half the size and memory usage of Microsoft's own Task Manager. The current release is proprietary and free, with a paid Pro version featuring additional capabilities planned, though pricing has not yet been announced.
- Original Task Manager creator relaunches it using AI-assisted coding
- New cross-platform app is leaner and more feature-rich than Microsoft's version
- Free version out now; paid Pro edition with more features planned
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Dave Plummer is a former Microsoft engineer best known for writing the original Windows Task Manager back in 1996. He has now built new versions of the tool for Windows, Mac and Linux, this time relying heavily on AI coding assistance rather than writing the code by hand himself.
The project, developed with an AI coding tool called Fable from a lengthy written specification, was partly an experiment to test how capable AI-assisted coding, sometimes called "vibe coding", has become. Task Manager is the utility that lets users see and control what programs and processes are running on their computer, so a more capable version has practical appeal, and Plummer says the new apps offer deeper insight than the originals while using less memory than Microsoft's current tool.
The story matters because it touches on a wider debate about whether AI tools can now produce reliable, professional-grade software, or whether they still tend to generate poor-quality results, often called "slop", without careful human oversight.