The Problem Nobody Was Solving
I spent 33 years doing every job on the plant floor. Operator, supervisor, manager — I've done it all, hands-on.
And for 33 years I watched the same thing happen over and over: plants spending a fortune on enterprise software that the people actually running the facility couldn't stand using and would op out.
Until now.
What I Built
Trier OS is a full-stack, open-source plant operations platform. Not a SaaS. Not a subscription. A self-hosted, fully air-gapped system built specifically for heavy industry.
Here's what's under the hood:
Built-in Monaco IDE — authorized operators can write, sandbox, and hot-reload code directly inside the running production app
Deterministic Simulation Engine — replays historical plant event logs against your code changes before deploying. Mathematical proof it won't break the line.
Friction Cost Engine — calculates the exact financial cost of UI changes before they ship
3D GIS Mapping — Cesium-powered spatial intelligence to track assets across entire campuses
Mobile Barcode Scanning — WebRTC-based, works on iOS, Android, and Zebra rugged devices
EDR-Safe Local Mode — runs completely disconnected from the cloud on better-sqlite3
Full Rollback
Offline PWA
Full CMMS/MES Hybrid
349,000 lines of code. 1,378 modules. Everything documented.
How AI Made It Possible
With AI assistance I was able to build this in 33 days. But here's the thing — AI didn't know what to build. That came from three decades of watching plants operate, fail, and adapt.
The domain knowledge, the workflow logic, every edge case — that's 33 years of floors, not prompts. AI was the tool. The experience was the blueprint.
The Real Goal
Enterprise software licenses cost companies a fortune. By open sourcing Trier OS, my hope is simple: take those savings and hire in-house developers to run and customize it on site.
Free software. In-house talent. More jobs for programmers. Better tools for operators.
Win for the industry. Win for developers.
Happy to answer any questions
Get here https://github.com/DougTrier/trier-os
Top comments (7)
AI logo is trash
Whole implementation is done by AI, if I understand that correctly.
Wonder how it performs regarding maintenance. I'm curious how hard it'll be to analyze the first critical bug that occurs in production, fix it, test and ultimately ship the fix...
I directed and guard railed the AI Agent according to my plan. Forced Task list and stopping between each task, review then test then continue. The reason why is small context window and no hallucination (AI Slop). The reason the comment density is purposly high is not only for developers to be able to jump onboard and make it a lot easier for them to understand but also gives guiadance to AI Agent if it passes over the code again during a modification or update. We currently sit at 10.6% context density which is 4x the norm. Everything is well documented. high comment density, and guardrails enable rapid diagnosis and targeted fixes, minimizing turnaround time for critical issues. It has been throughly human tested and Playwright tested.
It is Open Source ? Where is the code ?
Thomas, you are right. Here it is github.com/DougTrier/trier-os I edited the article too.
Great job !!
Thank you