The author of the original legendary 1996 Windows Task Manager has released new versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, telling The Reg the project started life as a way to see if vibe coding could produce something useful.

"I picked Task Manager as a simpler target to see how ready AI is for primetime… or if it would just degrade to slop," former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer told us.

"And it turns out it depends on what you ask for, largely! And what you test and instrument. It's like having a very ambitious and precocious intern, but like the classic genie in the bottle, be careful what you wish for."

The update is a much fuller-featured affair, designed to offer insight into the inner workings of a user's system rather than behaving like a bare-bones process-killer as it once did. As such, it bears a passing resemblance to the current Windows Task Manager. However, it can drill into more detail and expose more metrics.

Aesthetically, as well as the similarities to the Task Manager found in Windows 11, the interface gives off similar vibes to media player skins of the 1990s and 2000s. "I wanted it to look and feel like my Pioneer RT-909 reel to reel," said Plummer.

The user can set the font and theme to something more suited to the their task. However, if you fancy that Amber or Green screen look, that's possible. So is full color. Users can also set the bloom and saturation via a slider that goes up to 11.

The application started as a 107-page specification that Plummer passed to Fable. After a three-and-a-half-hour first pass, the first iteration of the application was produced. "It balked a few times thinking I was doing security work," said Plummer, "but mostly cooperated."

The cross-platform nature of the application is interesting. Rather than going down the Electron path, Plummer and his team elected to use native UI code. The app is Swift on the Mac version, Direct2D/DirectComposition on Windows, and Qt on Linux. "It's more work," he said, "but worth it in a task manager or something that has to have game-like response times."

"The biggest surprise," said Plummer, "was that I could get them looking as close to one another as they do given the platforms are wildly different."

It's efficient too; the Windows version we looked at was roughly half the size of the Microsoft version, and used half the amount of RAM.

The code is proprietary for now, and there's a Pro version in the works with more features which will also carry a price tag. The price has yet to be set. There could well be a further beta release between now and then – this is, after all, pre-release software at present.

As it stands, the updated take on Task Manager is an example of what can be achieved with imagination and vibe coding, and highlights the importance of specification and prompt engineering to produce something useful too.

Also, considering it is fuller-featured than Windows Task Manager, more customizable, and more efficient, it is hard not to see it as a challenge to Redmond, even if that was definitely not the authors' intention. ®