Developer uses Claude to vibe code a Windows 3.1 shell in an hour — reanimated 12MB retro launcher runs on both Windows 11 and Apple Silicon

If you are yearning for a quick-shot retro Windows experience on your modern Windows 11 or macOS system, then there’s a new vibe-coded clone of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager that may interest you. Developer Mayuki has released a neat little nostalgia project dubbed ReProgman – named after the ancient Windows 3.1 ‘progman.exe ’, which was the primary shell of the era – until Windows 95 swept it away three decades ago.

ReProgman looks pretty authentic to my eyes, and it brought back memories of why I wasn’t sad to see it shrivel away from Windows machines. In a social media post about the release of ReProgman, Mayuki seems to agree with my sentiments. “I asked Claude to create a clone of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager,” wrote the developer (machine translation). “I think you’ll enjoy reminiscing with it for about 30 seconds.”

Claude Code worked pretty swiftly to churn out this clone of the Windows 3.1 shell. The first version that was precipitated in about an hour was “pretty decent” but needed some effort to iron out the wrinkles. Then Mayuki complains again that actually using ReProgman induced boredom after about half a minute of usage.

The end-user-ready releases of ReProgman weigh in at between 12 and 16MB, so they are quite a trivial download and don’t need installing. Thus, it isn’t very taxing to give them a try for a spot of nostalgia-tinted navigation around your present system’s programs and files. Mayuki says that building and running this application needs the .NET SDK 10.0+. The code has been released on GitHub under the MIT license.

In conclusion, Miyuki’s ReProgman provides an easy trip down personal computing’s memory lane, specifically to the Windows 3.X era of the early to mid-1990s. However, some will prefer to get their retro computing kicks by running the actual MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 combo on real hardware. As we discovered recently, that doesn’t limit users to dusting off an old i486 or similar. Back in April, an enthusiast demoed Windows 3.1X on ultra-modern bare metal with a system using a Ryzen 9 9900X and RTX 5060 Ti.