I built an industrial OS - here's what 33 years on the plant floor taught me about software

Doug Trier — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:19:27 +0000

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

DEV Community: Doug Trier

I built an industrial OS - here's what 33 years on the plant floor taught me about software