macOS vs Windows

Most AI tooling — CLI agents, scripts, tutorials — quietly assumes a Unix shell. That shapes the practical choice of dev environment.

• macOS is Unix-native. It ships with a real POSIX shell and the same git, ssh, and curl the rest of the dev world uses. Most agents and scripts "just work."
• Windows is fully capable, but the smoothest path is WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux): a real Linux environment inside Windows. Do your AI coding inside WSL2 rather than fighting native PowerShell quirks.
• Linux is the third member of the family and behaves almost exactly like macOS for these purposes — it is Unix, so the same agents and scripts run unchanged. If you're already on it, you're set.

A few gotchas to keep your work portable across all of them:

• Paths — /home/you/project versus C:\Users\you\project; backslashes and drive letters break scripts. WSL2 sidesteps most of this.
• Line endings — Windows uses CRLF, Unix uses LF. Mismatches cause noisy diffs and broken shell scripts; set core.autocrlf and a .gitattributes to normalize to LF.
• Case-sensitivity — macOS and Windows often treat File.ts and file.ts as the same; Linux and CI do not, so code that builds locally can fail in the cloud. Be consistent with casing in imports and filenames.
• Permissions — Unix file modes (chmod +x) don't map cleanly onto Windows.

Whichever you're on, ask the AI to keep commands portable — forward slashes, LF endings, consistent casing — so its scripts run the same on your laptop and in CI. When the AI hands you a one-liner that assumes a tool you don't have, the fastest fix is often to tell it your OS and shell in the context file so it stops guessing.