Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
I started from zero knowledge and spent months collaborating with AI agents as a learning experience. Every pixel and every function went through me. The AI translated what I asked for into code, but every decision was human. I didn't use existing OS frameworks because the goal was learning how basic coding languages worked while also developing my skills with AI collaboration. Apart from basic libraries like xp.css and paint.js, it's all original code.
The result is a fully functional Windows XP recreation running in your browser. Complete experience with sounds, animations, and working applications. Even works properly on mobile, which required rebuilding everything to maintain the authentic feel without becoming unusable on touchscreens.
This project taught me more about coding and AI collaboration than I ever expected. Would love to hear your thoughts on the execution and any feedback on the technical approach.
The core tension is between replication and creation. Yes, some things will always resemble what came before. A hard-boiled detective novel usually has a corpse or two, a bottle, and a wisecrack. But the artistry and work are in what you do with the formula. Take Les Roberts, for example. He wrote detective novels, sure, but he set them in Cleveland, gave them local color, and turned Northeast Ohio into a character. That's authorship. That's presence.
You can absolutely ask an AI to plot the story. But the soul, that point, is what you bring to it: the choices, the voice, the friction.
What gives me pause here is that I don't feel that presence. The project looks good, but it feels like Windows XP. Smooth, clean, and generic. I can't tell what this person's actual skills are. From the post, they clearly put in real time and effort. They learned something and got it working. But what I see is replication. Competent, yes. But flat, in my opinion.
If I were in their shoes, someone who would struggle to replicate this, I'd still treat that as step one.
Okay, I copied it. Now, what can I improve? What parts of the interface feel off? Where could I take a risk? Then, show the before and after.
So here's the long-winded point.
Why stop at imitation? Why not go further? Why not show that you can replicate something, build on it, shape it, and own it?
That's the more profound concern I have about AI collaboration. How do you show your work in a world of infinite templates and effortless iteration? How do you show your soul, or if you are too shy to bare your soul, at least a differentiator, that means you should be hired?
(I say this with the absolute irony that I used Grammarly to ensure this collection of words somewhat resembled a coherent thought. In the words of Dirty Harry, "A man has to know his limitations."[0]) ---
[0] Probably a misquote.
But the problem with you billing yourself as a graphic designer and reimplementing Windows XP is that you’re copying a design that already exists rather than showcasing your own design skills, so I can’t immediately tell how good a designer you are[0].
I can look at your projects under the IE icon, which gives more of an impression, but some of the visuals there do look decidedly AI generated, which isn’t super-encouraging.
The UX is also weird. For example, the back/forward history controls behave like carousel controls through your portfolio, whereas when I hit back/previous I expect to be taken back to the menu of projects.
If you applied to me for a job with this, would I interview you?
Yes, I would, simply because I can see you’ve put a lot of effort in and created something high quality. But I’d have some reservations because of the concerns I’ve raised above and, in particular, I’d want to dig in to how user-centred your approach is, because that isn’t really demonstrated here.
Sorry if this sounds discouraging. What you’ve done is cool, and I like it, and it would certainly get you a foot in the door of many interview processes, but that will be when the real work of showcasing your skills begins.
I hope that makes sense?
[0] Literally, I could do this, and I suck at design. It’s very similar to the process of implementing a design passed to me by a UX Designer, which I’ve done loads of times.
Then the site satisfied its purpose. A portfolio site should get you an interview with someone who is curious to know more. Its purpose is to be a foot in the door, not to get you the job.
As a portfolio, I think it doesn't work at all and is detrimental to what you're trying to do. I think now in design, it is more important than ever for your work to cut through the noise and show at least some attempt to create something original.
I think sometimes graphic design is seen as competence with certain programs, which I guess includes genAI now, or making something cool - but really it is visual communication that responds to a set of constraints - e.g. a brief, tailored to a target audience, communicating a product or emotion. There are no shortcuts - study what has been done, work on communicating what you want to say with colour, layout, typography and images. Draw and paint; avoid genAI until you are competent without it. Currently as a graphic design portfolio, I'm sorry to say it is memorably bad and there is a lot of work to do.
That said, well done on finishing something, and making it to the top of HN. I hope the attention leads somewhere and that you continue making things.
The reality is, it depends on the context of whom is hiring. A startup values things like being resourceful and finishing stuff vs a large firm wherein most projects get dumped anyway.
Here goes:
1. "Welcome" on the login screen should be lowercase
2. Balloon is too high (should touch the icon), close icon is too small (should be roughly the same height as the balloon title)
3. About Me is missing the scrollbar on Firefox
4. Wrong gradient for "Social Links"
5. Start menu should have a shadow
6. In My Projects, two tiles are loading forever
7. Windows that cannot be maximized, but can be minimized, should have all three buttons, with the middle one disabled
8. Paint did not have the Windows logo in the corner. It would be better to show the JSPaint menu bar to make things like Undo accessible, and the JSPaint authors deserve attribution.
9. "Git Co-pilot" is not a thing, as Git ≠ GitHub. (On the XP project page.)
If I were making something like this, I would probably skip the boot and login screens (certainly would not require user interaction; indeed, XP would automatically log you in if you had a single passwordless user), and show "About Me" on startup, so that potential clients don’t give up before they learn more about you.
I opened the page before reading your post, and what immediately jumped out at me is that you say you’re a graphic designer but then you’re copying someone else’s old design which isn’t even that good.
The second thing I noticed was the obvious AI icon for the login, and that hovering on it makes it move weirdly. I haven’t used Windows XP in over two decades but don’t remember it doing that. It looks like an error.
At that point, I started losing confidence. You are supposed to be a graphic designer but are obviously using AI to design graphics and I assumed you would be doing the same for the code.
The resume as a fake PDF is cramped and zooming in feels like a poor solution.
Same thing with your projects, I can’t view them properly because they’re shoved in a tiny window for no reason. Plus, two of them are just loading animations, and it’s hard to understand if they’re broken or will ever load.
Then I finally read your post. You say you had no coding experience and used AI agents and “every decision was human”, but if you don’t know how to code, most of the decisions will have been made by the LLM even if you instructed it in particular ways. Do you feel confident regarding what you ostensibly learned and that you’d be able to reimplement most of the project yourself from scratch?
Again, it is interesting and a cool project, but it’s not particularly well-made or original¹ and I feel that as a portfolio actually does you a disservice by showcasing your skills in the worst possible light.
¹ https://win32.run
Its a lot of work setting everything you have up spend sometime on more details / applications
Another interesting aspect of this particular implementation is that it blends naturally with a browser tab hierarchy, it does not try to overrule it, it just blends in. Probably thanks to a distinctive taskbar, or maybe it is due to the startup screen/login/sound that set up a distinctive boundary "you are here now, and this is a friendly place to be".
Everything under 150 ms is pretty much indistinguishably fast to a normal person.
Very fast response time for the UI interactions. "Modern" UIs can have a few fast transitions but the overall interactions with the different components have a human noticeable lag that make them uneasy.
edit: I'm new here! let me get some of that sweet sweet karma!
I've also marked your account legit so it won't get misassessed by those nasty spam filters in the future!
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If Windows XP had had some kind of super professional “create a portfolio” app that would output an executable binary that you could download it would’ve been lauded as amazing and beautiful if it looked like what you created.
This is great. It shows your skills, but also brings back the beauty of Windows XP, in a contemporary but historically accurate format.
After reloading the page and leaving the CRT effect on, it worked once (the first time) then not.
Reloading the page and turning the CRT effect off immediately, it seems to work every time, but flickers.
You are going to be a wealthy man very soon now from all that karma.
- The taskbar tabs are slightly off from how they looked in the real XP (must be the borders? It's the same issue with the windows as well).
- The close/maximize/minimize buttons never had hover transitions
- By default, desktop icons didn't have any hover effects in the real XP
- I'm surprised you didn't recreate the XP mouse cursor!
- IE6:
Personally, I've used XP a lot back in the day, but don't remember much of the details like most users are reporting here, so I really liked to play with your website, and would definitely hire you if I was in such position.
Good luck!
the rest, are all aesthetic decisions haha but I was aware of some of them - I'm surprised you missed the biggest one of them all though.. also that nobody else has mentioned it yet - maybe its because nobody has tried it
the drag selection over desktop icons highlights the icons in a way much closer to windows 11 than XP... i really just thought it deserved an upgrade
edit: did i miss it or did you just add the thing about selection? you're right though
Every time I see it, a part of me misses the styling of Windows XP. It was kind of the only well-regarded windows that tried to actually be fun; the fact that there was a little dog mascot in the search results, the fact that the bar on the bottom kind of looks like a Fisher Price toy, Clippy!
I kind of miss when professional programs were allowed to be goofy.
As a side note, I really like your avatar; has kind of a Simpsons/Bob's Burgers vibe that I find appealing.
The other thing is, I think the portfolio doesn't really match the quality of the website you vibe coded. This is actually a pretty bad sign that your own work is not as good as something you can do with AI (human assisted or not). The website is pretty high quality, so browsing through extremely simple assets just feels out of place.
Overall it's a good project.
https://win32.run/
Good times.
Great site, thanks for nostalgia!
That person is incorrect. WinXP started selling at retail in Oct 2001. I started using it at work in early 2002 and as a senior employee in a tech company I had a pretty deluxe 21-inch Viewsonic CRT which ran at 2048 x 1536 resolution. That Viewsonic cost $1600 new in 2000 and looked great. The company didn't upgrade to flat screens until about 2006 when the Viewsonic was replaced with a 20-inch Dell 2005fpw with native 1680 x 1050 resolution for $800. That's the year Windows Vista came out.
Even in 2006 corporate priced LCDs at the 20-inch size didn't look quite as good as the high-quality CRT I switched from. In some ways (like sharpness) a good LCD could look better but in other ways (like contrast) it wasn't as good yet - so it was still a mixed bag. About 2004 the company started buying newly hired entry-level employees 15 or 17-inch LCDs but they were typically 1024 x 768 and the quality wasn't great. A designer like you would definitely have stuck with a CRT longer both for quality and screen size at a reasonable price.
As a former Windows XP user: this is amazingly detailed and well done! The CRT effect is spot on for me.
Well, not really, and it depended highly on the place of work/study and country/state. For example, my University replaced the CRT ones with LCDs only in 2005-06 (they've used XP in computer rooms for quite a long time, skipping Vista and 8).
I myself used the CRT monitor with winXP until the late 2004.
I used my mom's iMac G3 (CRT) probably until 2004 or so, because I distinctly remember getting stuck on Tutorial Island on RuneScape as a kid, since you had to Right-click -> "Prospect Rock", and at the time, I had no idea how to actually do it with Apple's single-button mice lmao.
Aside from the couple of laptops that came later, I don't think I had moved on [for the worse] until a bit after I put together my first DIY computer (Phenom II 920, etc); I still had a CRT TV in my room long enough to have been using it when Halo Reach came out.
You should open source this and let other people contribute and build apps that work inside this sim. I would love to build a version of our browser into this. (https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS)
UI these days are flat everything and pretty boring.
It would be wonderful if you could also share or write a post about your vibe coding journey to put this together!
im open to all connections btw :) i'm just getting started!
It might be spiritually close to vibe coding in some ways because the author wasn't previously a programmer, so this code was never reviewed by a professional or trained developer.
But it was a high-effort project that involved inspecting and trying to understand the code, which isn't what vibe coding is about.
Whatever we want to call it, I think it's awesome! This is a good use of LLMs to help laypeople break into writing code imo, and the result is great.
I suspect that this sort of design wouldn't come up a lot, but do you think about the difference between this experience and the experience of designing something where you used a workflow that you were familiar with? Or put another way, if you did this again, would it go faster or would it take the same amount of time?
But aside from that, I would still say yes. I've learned a lot (it's just hard to put into words when I'm missing some of the technical language) and I've gained so much confidence in even dealing with code.
I've actually started doing some work for someone after they saw my site on Reddit, which I could never have done before. It involves Docker, a bit of Python, and working on a codebase with multiple contributors. It's both exciting and terrifying at the same time.
I just had to make some small changes so it would blend in better with my site
Makes me wonder what windows mobile could have been
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Older AT power supplies were entirely mechanically controlled using the power button. ATX power supplies added the ability to turn on or off via software. That screen was shown on PCs using an AT PSU because Windows couldn't shut it down itself, it had to ask the user to do it.
https://youtu.be/1N8MSI0mB04
thanks
otherwise, cool, nice, great work!
On my dell XPS13 (Windows) the high DPI scaling makes the page display "please rotate your device back to portrait mode" . If I zoom out a few steps (ctrl-minus in the browser), it loads fine.
Follow your intuition (whilst having some cash inflows to survive).
https://github.com/cloudflare/doom-wasm
=3
In university design classes they made it pretty clear we should take care choosing sources for assets we used, even as a base for our work. At least back in the early oughts. Maybe it's different now that crime is legal.
otherwise, fun, great, keep going!
Only pet peeve I have is with the obvious AI generated art (including the wallpaper?) — still can't get onboard with them.
Yeah for sure, I completely get it - I can genuinely understand the large majority of reasons people have for holding that opinion and I don't even necessarily disagree with many of them. I will admit, I do find it wildly entertaining and having the ability to turn an idea into something tangible almost instantly allows me to produce more high quality work.
Aside from personal opinions, I just think that it's pretty clear where the world's going and since money doesn't care about feelings - companies are going to use it. so I feel like it probably helps, or at least will start to help more and more as time goes on having it clear that I can and do use these AI tools they keep hearing about.
btw, if you let your mail app open - whatever you typed into my contact me app will be pre-filled in a new message ready to send
I kind of assumed that if someone found themselves in that position they would contact me another way and it shouldn't be a dealbreaker haha
That said, I wonder if it makes sense for a graphic designer to have a portfolio with a design that just copies someone else's (Microsoft's)?
Now try windows93 [0]
enjoy.
[0] https://www.windows93.net
only since a few days ago haha
This is so absurdly cringe and absolutely not coding. It’s like saying I spent absolutely trying to get ChatGPT to write my college essay for me. At the end of the writing period, I wrote nothing but decided which ai goop I liked best.
Who's hiring a graphic designer based on a Windows XP aesthetic that they didn't even produce? Of course novelty. But then what. Not really promoting the graphic design side. Not really promoting the development site. Bizarre noob accounts here loving it.
He cooked. (But not really) And we're all cooked.