14 ms·

Glaze by Raycast

234 points by romac 7mo ago

dmbche 7mo ago
This has to be performance art
grincek 7mo ago
[dead]
lorenzoguerra 7mo ago
I cannot bring myself to trust unreviewed software enough to install it on my own machine with arbitrary permissions. I understand the push for AI-generated websites, because the code running in my browser's sandbox is gonna have very limited permissions to do anything evil, but desktop apps are a completely different story
- thomaspaulmann 7mo ago
  I feel you! We thought about this and all apps will have a permission model. So you can limit it to specific file disk locations, domains for network requests, and so on.
  - s__s 7mo ago
    Can you explain how the permission model works?
  - ftchd 7mo ago
    I don't see how this solves the issue, something bad can happen regardless of permission granularity, no? Definitely a good initiative though. I like how coding harnesses do it, showing you the exact command that would run, or running it in a sandbox first.
mcjiggerlog 7mo ago
This looks super fun, actually. I wonder what it is actually building. Tauri apps, maybe?
- rockwotj 7mo ago
  One would think it must otherwise there are all these issues with compiling, signing tc if they don’t have xcode installed etc. I would guess it’s some webview wrapper with a layer to expose desktop app functionality
  - rockwotj 7mo ago
    Or it’s compiled in the cloud?
- coffeebeqn 7mo ago
  Electron I bet
Bishonen88 7mo ago
So, another wrapper around claude 4.6 for +xx% higher price? Using just claude code, one can do what glazeapp seems to aim for, no? "Beautiful by default" seems to be a system prompt akin to: Design Philosophy Create apps that feel premium, polished, and worthy of being featured on Dribbble's most popular shots. Every pixel matters. White space is your friend. Less is more, but what remains must be perfect. Visual Design Principles Color & Theming • Use sophisticated, limited color palettes (2-3 primary colors maximum) ...
- xd1936 7mo ago
  It looks like it's a lot of sensible defaults UI libraries to use, UX framework presets, etc, designed for an end user who doesn't know what Node or Electron or Rust or Tauri are. Plus, the page describes an app sharing mechanism as well built-in.
- alxndr13 7mo ago
  To be honest, but I would love to have some ecosystem around building apps which lets me share my custom apps with team members in my organization. Without having to take care of updating, provisioning, and distributing the app, etc. even better if the apps are not electron bloated and mac-native.
- wbobeirne 7mo ago
  Reading what they're offering, the stand-out to me is making publishing the applications easy for others on your team to use. That would he a pain point for non technical users.
  - Bishonen88 7mo ago
    I get your point. But if sharing with others is a vital part of this, then ... they'd be better off sticking to web apps instead :) "Create with glaze, hit publish and we'll give you an url". Even though they portray some of the benefits of this app as unique to desktop apps, they're not (e.g. storing data on device, offline mode etc.). Am not a hater. Love Raycast. Saw the post and opened the link intrigued what they came up with and was somewhat disappointed tbh. Good luck to them anyway!
foo4u 7mo ago
Claude Code is pretty good at Swift + Swift UI. I created and have been iterating on a menubar app for myself that I plan to share with a small team. I'd prefer to do this native than go through a 3rd party solution. I do have prior experience developing for iOS but that was pre-swift.
- mrklol 7mo ago
  Same thought I had while reading, don’t really see a big advantage here.
- kylehotchkiss 7mo ago
  Thank you for your service. We need more of you. Not more electron slop.
- dewey 7mo ago
  I'm also just working on my first iOS Swift app (Mostly for myself, don't know yet if I'll make it public as it's just a clone of Swarm / Gowalla but based on OpenStreetMap data) and it works really well with Claude Code. I'm not using the Xcode integration and so there's still some rough parts where build errors show up in Xcode and I then have to paste them into my Terminal. When you are used to backend work...it's kinda fun to see an app come to life and run on your phone though.
  - transitorykris 7mo ago
    xcode's new AI using claude is not performing as well as claude code for me. I've tried a couple times and quickly fall back to using vscode with xcode sitting in a window beside. I don't mind the copypaste of warnings and errors since my workflow is less vibe and more directed/iterative.
  - marcelp_ 7mo ago
    why are you using the xcode UI at all? you can ask claude to run the build via CLI, which will return build errors that claude can read and fix itself until it works. it can even take screenshots from the simulator to debug the app UI.
orliesaurus 7mo ago
they did it again, glad I am on Mac, congrats raycast
prodigycorp 7mo ago
Someone please exfiltrate their prompts/skills so i can use these on Codex. I've have relative success building my own apps for mac using Codex but they're uglier than sin and dont seem to understand well how permissions work. Having antigravity is useful because Gemini 3.1 is pretty good at generating UI sugar. Claude 4.6 Opus provides nothing to write home about. Their shadcn looksmaxxing hasn't generalized to writing good desktop UIs. Raycast's only edge here seems to be the fact that they are obviously very good at Mac app development and probably have impeccable skills/documentation for building them. Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play. If I'm Apple, the reason to buy a product/team like this is a no-brainer.
- rafram 7mo ago
  > Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play. No kidding, although I think Apple would only be interested if it uses SwiftUI. (The marketing page doesn't say. Raycast itself uses React + Node for extensions, but its React components render to native widgets.)
- mgrandl 7mo ago
  Raycast are not building Mac apps the apple way though. They are using react native and I am willing to bet that this does too.
  - FelipeCortez 7mo ago
    I always thought it was native. You can write extensions using React, yes, but I was under the impression those got compiled to their internal Swift-based UI components
    - Leftium 7mo ago
      Raycast could be both native and written with React Native: React Native itself renders JSX as native components (not a web view that renders HTML/CSS). People conflate React with HTML because that is the most common renderer, but React can be rendered into anything.
twalichiewicz 7mo ago
It's certainly a nice promotional website. My first thought was, "So, Replit and ilk?", seems they expected that comparison: > How is Glaze different from Lovable, Replit, or v0? > Those tools build for the browser. Glaze builds for your desktop. That means your apps can access your file system, your camera, keyboard shortcuts, menu bar integration, and background processes. Things a web app can’t do. It’s a different category entirely. Pretty sure modern web apps can do all of those (sans menu bar). (If anything they do background processes better since you can send a very long task off to a server and shut off your computer, come back later and pick up where you left off.) Also, as others mentioned, this just seems like Claude Code with extra steps, unless they managed to nail some sort of design standard enforcement they feel is better than what most people can get out of it. The quick publishing is kind of nice, but it immediately made me think it would be more interesting to have a way to quickly remix other people's creations, similar to the Figma Community tab: you can take someone else's work, break it apart to see how it works, then tweak it how you want it.
- varun_ch 7mo ago
  A big thing would be API requests/browser automation. Web apps can’t do that without a backend proxy due to CORS
- tshaddox 7mo ago
  > Also, as others mentioned, this just seems like Claude Code with extra steps, unless they managed to nail some sort of design standard enforcement they feel is better than what most people can get out of it. Well yeah, isn’t that criticism we’ve had every LLM wrapper for years now? “Show me the prompt!” But that doesn’t mean these types of products are useless.
- nateb2022 7mo ago
  > Also, as others mentioned, this just seems like Claude Code with extra steps, unless they managed to nail some sort of design standard enforcement they feel is better than what most people can get out of it. My feeling is that it's intended for a less-technical audience than Claude Code.
Fervicus 7mo ago
"Insecure apps, reimagined by you"
codeptualize 7mo ago
No mention of security.. remarkable
- elxr 7mo ago
  They'd need another 30 full time devs for that.
- mattcantstop 7mo ago
  Makes sense to me. It's a marketing page. Know your audience.
- Hamuko 7mo ago
  The “S” in “Glaze” stands for “security”.
smusamashah 7mo ago
It will be awesome if these were native apps instead of JavaScript apps. It's not mentioned anywhere explicitly that these are native.
mglvsky 7mo ago
what about barebone/starter desktop app that can be modified itself by prompts? that's would be Electron app, but without unneeded bloat
bpavuk 7mo ago
so many unknowns... 1. macOS and Windows require installation of Xcode and Visual Studio respectively, and if in Apple's case you kinda can install these tools headlessly and choose to install only the "build tools" package, Microsoft's creature is gonna daze and confuse you with a crap-ton of checkboxes and no easy "just install whatever is minimally needed to compile my code" button, and I don't recall if there is way to install build tools on Windows through terminal. 2. what is going to be distributed? source code itself or actual binaries? and what will the security model of Glaze store be? same as extensions, "everything is open-source and undergoes Raycast's and community review"? 3. Glaze is going to come to Windows and Linux, if we trust the Q&A section at the end. what will Glaze build upon? separate frameworks and languages for each platform or something multi-platform [1] like Tauri or Kotlin Multiplatform? or are you going to copy the Raycast extension model - just run Node, expose some platform integration, and parse React render trees through "Glaze Runtime"? I've been working on a bug in Vicinae [2][3], and I've seen this model in action. it's very hard to make it perform well, but all it takes to achieve native look and feel is to just map React render trees to whatever system component OS offers. (in Vicinae's case, it's Qt. bet that it's done with SwiftUI on macOS and WinUI 3 on Windows.) [1]: there is a difference between "cross-platform" and "multi-platform". "cross-platform" means "I behave equally across platforms and have no awareness of native look and feel" (e.g. Electron, Unity, Flutter), while "multi-platform" means "I can adapt across platforms to the degree you need" (e.g. C/C++, Rust, KMP) [2]: https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae [3]: https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae/pull/1158 https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae/pull/1158
- danpalmer 7mo ago
  I think we can make assumptions for all of these. Raycast extensions aren't compiled code, and run within the Raycast runtime/engine. I'd bet that this is exactly the same. In many ways that's the same as Chrome apps, they have no code, they're just the Chrome binary, so there aren't any code signing issues.
robinhood 7mo ago
Impressive feat. Definitely not for me though, and for sure I won't be there to debug one of these when my parents will call me because it broke their computers.
sporksmith 7mo ago
I thought this must be a joke at first. "Glaze" is in pretty heavy use as recent slang for "when someone excessively praises another person in a way that feels over-the-top." https://creativesimiles.com/glaze-meaning-slang/ https://creativesimiles.com/glaze-meaning-slang/ ie the annoying way that LLMs interact with users
- giraffe_lady 7mo ago
  Maybe a quietly dissenting PM snuck it by. If so, nice.
- titanomachy 7mo ago
  "Heavy use" to the point where it might even be more common than the older senses of "cover with icing" or "install windows".
- ultropolis 7mo ago
  It's so much worse. Your link fails to mention that the "Glaze" in question is a cough bodily fluid. Yes that one. Have I seen politicians use "glaze" recently? Yes. Gross. On the other hand it is kind of the perfect name for Yet Another AI Website Maker (YAAWM?).
  - junofan 7mo ago
    Nah it’s from Dunkin Donuts [1]. > First you said all you want is love and affection / Let me be your angel and I'll be your protection / … / Thought I was a donut, you tried to glaze me > I ain’t gotta tell you I had a Dunkin' Donuts fetish back in the day. I used to get a dozen donuts every day, man. So it was one of the things that was on my mind [1]: https://genius.com/1716467 https://genius.com/1716467
  - apt-apt-apt-apt 7mo ago
    It's worse than that, the glaze is only the by-product of the primary action in question.
  - __float 7mo ago
irenetusuq 7mo ago
[dead]
sangeeth96 7mo ago
Looking forward to trying this out and see how this differs from more manual approaches. One thing that stands out is an included store for public/private distribution — that’s super convenient given the cumbersome (and maybe, horrific) process that is the app store submission.
freetonik 7mo ago
Ironically, there's another project named Glaze, that aims to "protect artists from generative AI" (https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/ https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/)
- ZeWaka 7mo ago
  There's also a window(s) tiling manager named Glaze that's pretty popular: https://github.com/glzr-io/glazewm https://github.com/glzr-io/glazewm
geooff_ 7mo ago
This is just a landing page. There's not even any decent product specs. Nothing technical. How does this make front page of hacker news?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
_pdp_ 7mo ago
How many apps do you really need that are not already done - perhaps even better?
- hombre_fatal 7mo ago
  I've vibe coded all sorts of apps for my macbook. A better replacement to iStat Menus. A local-only voice to text whisper.cpp transcriber I can globally use while holding ctrl-semicolon. A menubar app that manages blocky and can easily turn it off or change dns. A tool like hammerspoon but I configure it via nix-darwin and it has no cruft. All of these are apps that use 30MB memory and are better than the apps they replace, and I can make changes any time I want. That's far better than using someone else's software and giving it privileged access to my machine. Also, perhaps the best point is that so much software is junk that is obsoleted by someone with better UX intuitions even if they are vibe-coding it. Being written by hand by an engineer means basically nothing when it comes to "is this a good app?" Which is why product-minded people are the biggest winners in the new AI era.
  - ukuina 7mo ago
    Neat! What does the stack look like?
    - hombre_fatal 7mo ago
      Swift + AppKit. No Xcode. For less trivial apps, use Elm architecture for a pure, testable core.
- WarmWash 7mo ago
  The problem that software suffers from is that every app/program tries to cover as many bases and use cases as possible in a single package. Obviously it's what you want to do if you want to maximize reach/customers. Vibe apps are different. They do exactly what you want, exactly the way you want it done. No more downloading an app that is mysteriously 180MB and requires watching a youtube video to learn how to make it change your background every 5 minutes to different dog pictures.
jFriedensreich 7mo ago
Just what absolutely no one needed: another locked down and non web platform with horrific security that tries to digitally enslave people just the tiniest level above what they can accept now. I don’t see any future where raycast can survive and i would say its a good thing.
- adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
  I understand some of the skepticism towards this product, but are you saying this will somehow negatively impact Raycast (the company)? Raycast the tool is incredibly useful, so I'm surprised to see this sentiment.
  - jFriedensreich 7mo ago
    I am saying its as toxic as the main product of raycast and they got away with it in a world where people could not replicate apps and 100 plugins they use in days. There is zero possibility anyone i know will tolerate a locked ecosystems like this any longer than absolutely needed.
paxys 7mo ago
There seem to be more AI app building platforms than actual apps being built these days.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
ljlolel 7mo ago
Getting closer to ClaudeVM https://jperla.com/blog/claude-electron-not-claudevm https://jperla.com/blog/claude-electron-not-claudevm
kneel25 7mo ago
So it looks like they’re creating their own App Store within the app? At least it’s kept separate from official apps. But also how is that not a security nightmare Apple won’t allow?
dcchambers 7mo ago
I love Raycast. I would probably be called a "power user" - I use it all day long and have a fairly sophisticated and customized configuration and set of workflows. Raycast is actually one of the primary things keeping me on MacOS these days (please release a Linux version!). I am worried this is the start of them trying to diversify their product offering because revenue has stalled in the core Raycast product and VC demands more returns. I don't want to be jaded, but history teaches me to be. Here's hoping that Raycast itself is still a focus for the company.
- enpl992 7mo ago
  [dead]
dpweb 7mo ago
Have had good results on MacOS just using codex (or your cli of choice). Have it create a swift app, unless extended permissions are needed it can compile withouy going into xcode. Few simple util apps, disk cleaner, clipboard manager. Worked pretty well. Had better results than using xcode's built in ai extension.
HaloZero 7mo ago
But can it manage external libraries or use only the existing sdk? I had a non tech friend run into an issue recently where she wanted to automate a pdf action. Eventually I realized she needed to run homebrew and install a library. Curious if this actually manages that kind of process.
cdrnsf 7mo ago
I can't imagine trusting these apps with access to my camera, file system or any other sensitive permissions.
b450 7mo ago
Might sound like a rube here, but: is agentic development really this good at novel UIs? The video shows a sort of cassette tape music player, and a fancy looking audio visualizer/equalizer thing. I'm well aware agents are very good at boilerplate UIs, but I wouldn't expect them to be able to one-shot novel, dynamic UI elements like this. I've had Claude attempt some SVG animations and the results were very crude. That was a year or so ago though. Are there established ways of letting agents iterate on UIs, i.e. having them visually verify the visual design and interactions?
- marcus_holmes 7mo ago
  I had the same results a year ago. Everything has changed since ~Nov 25, give it another go and you'll be surprised
- adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
  Hooooo, boy, if you haven't used Opus 4.5/4.6, do yourself a favor and check it out. It's pretty good. My experience has been that Opus consistently generates UIs that are genuinely good. As always with anecdata, YMMV. There's a reason Tailwind Plus has revenue problems right now.
break_the_bank 7mo ago
It is interesting how so many different companies end up converging to some sort of AI coding. Raycast -> Glaze AirTable -> Lovable Competitor Retool -> Lovable Competitor Even those early in the journey are converging towards coding.
kylehotchkiss 7mo ago
Is this just shitting out electron crap?
Mongoose 7mo ago
Not to be a curmudgeon, but why are they spending time on this? As an enthusiastic Raycast user, I would prefer to see them focus on making Raycast better, not finding new ways to jump on the AI bandwagon.
- femiagbabiaka 7mo ago
  the first scenario that came to mind is that they built it for themselves and then open sourced it
- lintimes 7mo ago
  I had the same reaction. They've had Raycast releases paused for some time to focus on large feature improvements, but I wondered if it was partly for this.
- mamaluigie 7mo ago
  Welp this is what happens when the USA is spending more into this than it did in the space race comparatively. Space race we got to the moon, the AI output has yet to show profit from businesses other than funding the input.
- threecheese 7mo ago
  This seems a natural evolution of Raycast Extensions (which are an evolution of Script Commands) - given the current landscape (generative everything). I would be surprised if there’s no “Raycast inside” within and around the new toolchain. I’m torn about what this likely means for iOS; while I do want to do Raycast-y things in my phone, I’m not sure there’s enough of us to make a business out of it.
- nsonha 7mo ago
  I am an Raycast user and I see them improving Raycast (while working on this) including the AI features that I do use, so...
- AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
  More moneys.
mabedan 7mo ago
I don't understand how these type of projects are still tried and get any traction... anyone who has tried them will 100% know it won't go beyond a happy path demo. If they want to seriously use/publish the app beyond playing around, it'll require weeks of iteration via AI, which will cost you an arm and a leg in tokens.
- caro_kann 7mo ago
  I haven't used v0 or replit before, I have the same feelings as you. But I've been thinking about building macOS apps for my personal use for a long time now. Also I'm a long time Raycast user. I have a bias here, so I've joined the waitlist, I can't be sure until I try, right?
  - ricketycricket 7mo ago
    Just build Mac apps then. Claude Code can help you whip up real native apps without any Glaze dependencies just fine. I’ve built 4 Mac and iOS apps in the last 6 months for my own use. I even have my own HN app for iOS and Mac.
    - theturtletalks 7mo ago
      Even if you don't like Electron, I was able to get Claude to build Electrobun and Tauri apps as well. I don't understand what benefit Glaze will bring outside of more lock-in?
- thomaspaulmann 7mo ago
  Founder of Raycast here so obviously biased but you’ll be surprised. You get a working app one-shotted pretty much all the time. Sure if it is something more complex you might need a few more prompts. Just to give you some examples on what we’ve seen: - Our support team runs on Glaze apps to review Raycast extensions. It connects to GitHub, checks out code locally, gets realtime updates and so on. - The sound agency build a functioning synthesiser for the launch video. It works even with MIDI. - We’re about to cancel a team-wide subscription and replace it with a Glaze app. Not everything is possible yet and sure more complex things need more prompts but you’ll be surprised what Glaze is capable of already. It’s day one…
etchalon 7mo ago
Vibe-coding desktop apps is a much, much better solution for the vast majority of one-off tools most users want to build.
Imnimo 7mo ago
My metric for this kind of stuff is: Did Glaze build the Glaze app?
1propionyl 7mo ago
No thanks. As an interesting counter-proposal to wasting time with this... look for older less popular/downloaded/featureful apps written by people for their own education, edification and enjoyment. They may not work the way you wish they would, but you can learn a lot from them, be inspired by them, and leave feedback. That's how you actually encourage more people to get started and continue making their own tools.
imfing 7mo ago
I like the idea! Similar to how openclaw is exploring a “personal agent” that runs on your computer, this feels like a step toward personal software - tools that live locally, understand the context, and adapt to how we actually work. Excited to see how this evolves, feels like an interesting direction.
throw03172019 7mo ago
This is so far from Raycast’s core product offering, I’m confused. Pivot?
- danpalmer 7mo ago
  Raycast has always been chasing being a business process automation tool, not an app launcher. They have team subscriptions, team-wide distribution of automations in the launcher, so it feels like team-wide custom apps to automate further business processes is a natural extension of this. Whether that's what you want from Raycast as an individual user or not though is a fair question. I was a heavy user, but I recently switched back to Alfred. I love both, and there are things I think Raycast does much better than Alfred, but ultimately I'm not the target market for Raycast and I was feeling for a year or so that I was swimming upstream on my usage of it.
steve_adams_86 7mo ago
This is incredible, and I'm excited by this technology. I also feel like it's irresponsible to allow laypeople to potentially inject dangerous code into literal black box programs. This should come with a much clearer disclaimer that it could be dangerous to use it. I get that we've all been running homebrew and npm and so on without auditing every package, but there, there was some semblance of a trust mechanism and distributed review if something went wrong. Here we have totally unreviewed code running with no trust mechanism in place whatsoever. No public releases, no audit trail, no versioned releases, no community eyes on anything. Weird times
YVoyiatzis 7mo ago
As a Raycast user, I have to say the devs built something incredibly sleek and stable. It genuinely makes macOS feel like a pro-level OS. For the developers: will Glaze replace Raycast, or are they meant to run concurrently?
throwaway613746 7mo ago
[dead]
diebillionaires 7mo ago
i can get an app one shotted pretty much every time i use cline too. why would i ever use a proprietary solution that’s opinionated and likely eventually costs (idk i didn't look)? add this to the bubble theory
threecheese 7mo ago
As a Raycast paying user, I was a little bent that they have apparently not been focusing on the core product. However, having just vibe coded an actually useful Raycast extension, I can see wanting to bring this capability to a wider audience - and how this could scale their core product adoption beyond “nerds who think Spotlight stinks”. Which is getting A lot of good (if negative) comments ITT though; it’s going to be tough for them to bring this to market safely.
snickerbockers 7mo ago
Why is this called raycast when it doesn't appear to have anything to do with graphics or euclidean geometry?
pembrook 7mo ago
Raycast didn't raise $10B so they clearly aren't building their own model. So this is just another Codex/Cursor/Vscode but with different branding to target MacOS apps? Is there any novel features or is it literally just a pure play branding/packaging exercise over the openai/anthropic API to trick normies? I'm starting to get even more negative on AI coding tools...somehow they provide even less value-add than the trivial AI copywriting apps. At least the writing apps have to contend with building a text editor and workflows around collaboration/approval/publishing, which is actually a real value-add over the raw model API. But I've yet to find a coding tool with a moat given there's zero workflow differentiation even for large teams -- collaboration, approvals and pushing to prod is all handled by git either way!
outlore 7mo ago
The framing (and name) of this company (subsidiary?) is a bit unfortunate. If this had been built as a natural extension to the Raycast API, with the advertised benefit of being able to create desktop applications, I think it would go over a lot better than presenting it as a different product altogether that dilutes the main offering
LoganDark 7mo ago
Until something happens that disproves this, my personal belief is that supervision and manual review is one of the best ways to use a coding agent. You don't need to understand everything it does, but you will benefit from a technical background and from at least surface-level knowledge or intuition about what it spits out. I review every diff Claude Code applies and periodically re-review entire projects as a whole. Through this, I've managed to keep architectures fairly principled with future expansions in mind. I recently managed to essentially two-shot an MLX implementation of a working forward pass for a diffusion language model, based on CUDA source code that is not compatible with my machine. There's more work needed before it's anywhere usable in practice, but the fact that the model is now running at all on my machine is a very impressive start. For that, I had it study the CUDA source code and write a very detailed document with its analysis of exactly how the model is implemented. This document only had one material flaw. Then it studied MLX for a while and spat out a running forward pass based on the flawed document. The output wasn't of sufficient quality, so I had it insert debug prints throughout the whole inference process to see where it was going wrong. It found and fixed the forward pass and the flaw in the document. I needed no domain experience in LLMs or DLMs for this (although I benefit from some minor past contributions to RWKV.cpp). Another example is that I recently started getting into SwiftUI, and Claude Code is doing a very good job at demonstrating code patterns and pointing me towards APIs that may solve my problems. It also helped me set up things like API clients (which itself, of course, gave me pointers to all the sorts of documentation I'd benefit from reading in full). I reject a very large fraction of its suggestions, I tweak its plans very frequently and I tell it off a lot from things that either are unidiomatic or are objectively terrible hacks. But it is incredibly useful for menial work, for enumerating possibilities, for quickly scaffolding placeholder content, and for demonstrating patterns I haven't learned yet as they apply to my specific situation. For example, Claude Code quickly learned me how to use NSViewRepresentable, whereas in a past project where I didn't use LLMs, I absolutely struggled to embed a Metal view. But all that is to say that I'm skeptical of solutions that try to have you describe your idea in plain language; that try to insulate you from the code; or that make the lie that you just don't have to worry about it. If you work at all on the kinds of projects I work on, which are chock-full of reverse engineering and an obsessive focus on tightly-controlled design and idiomatic code, I firmly believe that treating the code like a black-box is not the way to do it. I don't know if Glaze truly hides the code, but I don't see any mention of it in the trailer video and that makes me feel a little dismissive.
zarcaxm 7mo ago
Is it's a futuristic teaser and an enjoyable one. But I don't get this focus on "Making Apps". These things been around for like 6 years, why am I still using apps that already existed before ?
nusl 7mo ago
I think it's time for me to move on from Raycast. It's decent, but I genuinely hate this direction. Shove AI in to every orifice, doesn't matter if anyone wants it. I guess they're trying to make more money and Raycast is a bit of a dead-end there.
- deleted 7mo ago
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lunias 7mo ago
So... can you explain why I wouldn't just use my own models and workflow? What does Glaze actually do? It looks like it has a private and public "store" where you can upload your apps? Can you explain to me how this is different than say, uploading my source / binaries to a server which is connected to the internet?

Glaze by Raycast

234 points by romac 7mo ago

dmbche 7mo ago

This has to be performance art

grincek 7mo ago

[dead]

lorenzoguerra 7mo ago

I cannot bring myself to trust unreviewed software enough to install it on my own machine with arbitrary permissions. I understand the push for AI-generated websites, because the code running in my browser's sandbox is gonna have very limited permissions to do anything evil, but desktop apps are a completely different story

thomaspaulmann 7mo ago
I feel you! We thought about this and all apps will have a permission model. So you can limit it to specific file disk locations, domains for network requests, and so on.
- s__s 7mo ago
  Can you explain how the permission model works?
- ftchd 7mo ago
  I don't see how this solves the issue, something bad can happen regardless of permission granularity, no? Definitely a good initiative though. I like how coding harnesses do it, showing you the exact command that would run, or running it in a sandbox first.

mcjiggerlog 7mo ago

This looks super fun, actually. I wonder what it is actually building. Tauri apps, maybe?

rockwotj 7mo ago
One would think it must otherwise there are all these issues with compiling, signing tc if they don’t have xcode installed etc. I would guess it’s some webview wrapper with a layer to expose desktop app functionality
- rockwotj 7mo ago
  Or it’s compiled in the cloud?
coffeebeqn 7mo ago
Electron I bet

Bishonen88 7mo ago

So, another wrapper around claude 4.6 for +xx% higher price? Using just claude code, one can do what glazeapp seems to aim for, no? "Beautiful by default" seems to be a system prompt akin to: Design Philosophy Create apps that feel premium, polished, and worthy of being featured on Dribbble's most popular shots. Every pixel matters. White space is your friend. Less is more, but what remains must be perfect. Visual Design Principles Color & Theming • Use sophisticated, limited color palettes (2-3 primary colors maximum) ...

xd1936 7mo ago
It looks like it's a lot of sensible defaults UI libraries to use, UX framework presets, etc, designed for an end user who doesn't know what Node or Electron or Rust or Tauri are. Plus, the page describes an app sharing mechanism as well built-in.
alxndr13 7mo ago
To be honest, but I would love to have some ecosystem around building apps which lets me share my custom apps with team members in my organization. Without having to take care of updating, provisioning, and distributing the app, etc. even better if the apps are not electron bloated and mac-native.
wbobeirne 7mo ago
Reading what they're offering, the stand-out to me is making publishing the applications easy for others on your team to use. That would he a pain point for non technical users.
- Bishonen88 7mo ago
  I get your point. But if sharing with others is a vital part of this, then ... they'd be better off sticking to web apps instead :) "Create with glaze, hit publish and we'll give you an url". Even though they portray some of the benefits of this app as unique to desktop apps, they're not (e.g. storing data on device, offline mode etc.). Am not a hater. Love Raycast. Saw the post and opened the link intrigued what they came up with and was somewhat disappointed tbh. Good luck to them anyway!

foo4u 7mo ago

Claude Code is pretty good at Swift + Swift UI. I created and have been iterating on a menubar app for myself that I plan to share with a small team. I'd prefer to do this native than go through a 3rd party solution. I do have prior experience developing for iOS but that was pre-swift.

mrklol 7mo ago
Same thought I had while reading, don’t really see a big advantage here.
kylehotchkiss 7mo ago
Thank you for your service. We need more of you. Not more electron slop.
dewey 7mo ago
I'm also just working on my first iOS Swift app (Mostly for myself, don't know yet if I'll make it public as it's just a clone of Swarm / Gowalla but based on OpenStreetMap data) and it works really well with Claude Code. I'm not using the Xcode integration and so there's still some rough parts where build errors show up in Xcode and I then have to paste them into my Terminal. When you are used to backend work...it's kinda fun to see an app come to life and run on your phone though.
- transitorykris 7mo ago
  xcode's new AI using claude is not performing as well as claude code for me. I've tried a couple times and quickly fall back to using vscode with xcode sitting in a window beside. I don't mind the copypaste of warnings and errors since my workflow is less vibe and more directed/iterative.
- marcelp_ 7mo ago
  why are you using the xcode UI at all? you can ask claude to run the build via CLI, which will return build errors that claude can read and fix itself until it works. it can even take screenshots from the simulator to debug the app UI.

orliesaurus 7mo ago

they did it again, glad I am on Mac, congrats raycast

prodigycorp 7mo ago

Someone please exfiltrate their prompts/skills so i can use these on Codex. I've have relative success building my own apps for mac using Codex but they're uglier than sin and dont seem to understand well how permissions work. Having antigravity is useful because Gemini 3.1 is pretty good at generating UI sugar. Claude 4.6 Opus provides nothing to write home about. Their shadcn looksmaxxing hasn't generalized to writing good desktop UIs. Raycast's only edge here seems to be the fact that they are obviously very good at Mac app development and probably have impeccable skills/documentation for building them. Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play. If I'm Apple, the reason to buy a product/team like this is a no-brainer.

rafram 7mo ago
> Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play. No kidding, although I think Apple would only be interested if it uses SwiftUI. (The marketing page doesn't say. Raycast itself uses React + Node for extensions, but its React components render to native widgets.)
mgrandl 7mo ago
Raycast are not building Mac apps the apple way though. They are using react native and I am willing to bet that this does too.
- FelipeCortez 7mo ago
  I always thought it was native. You can write extensions using React, yes, but I was under the impression those got compiled to their internal Swift-based UI components
  - Leftium 7mo ago
    Raycast could be both native and written with React Native: React Native itself renders JSX as native components (not a web view that renders HTML/CSS). People conflate React with HTML because that is the most common renderer, but React can be rendered into anything.

twalichiewicz 7mo ago

It's certainly a nice promotional website. My first thought was, "So, Replit and ilk?", seems they expected that comparison: > How is Glaze different from Lovable, Replit, or v0? > Those tools build for the browser. Glaze builds for your desktop. That means your apps can access your file system, your camera, keyboard shortcuts, menu bar integration, and background processes. Things a web app can’t do. It’s a different category entirely. Pretty sure modern web apps can do all of those (sans menu bar). (If anything they do background processes better since you can send a very long task off to a server and shut off your computer, come back later and pick up where you left off.) Also, as others mentioned, this just seems like Claude Code with extra steps, unless they managed to nail some sort of design standard enforcement they feel is better than what most people can get out of it. The quick publishing is kind of nice, but it immediately made me think it would be more interesting to have a way to quickly remix other people's creations, similar to the Figma Community tab: you can take someone else's work, break it apart to see how it works, then tweak it how you want it.

varun_ch 7mo ago
A big thing would be API requests/browser automation. Web apps can’t do that without a backend proxy due to CORS
tshaddox 7mo ago
> Also, as others mentioned, this just seems like Claude Code with extra steps, unless they managed to nail some sort of design standard enforcement they feel is better than what most people can get out of it. Well yeah, isn’t that criticism we’ve had every LLM wrapper for years now? “Show me the prompt!” But that doesn’t mean these types of products are useless.
nateb2022 7mo ago
> Also, as others mentioned, this just seems like Claude Code with extra steps, unless they managed to nail some sort of design standard enforcement they feel is better than what most people can get out of it. My feeling is that it's intended for a less-technical audience than Claude Code.

Fervicus 7mo ago

"Insecure apps, reimagined by you"

codeptualize 7mo ago

No mention of security.. remarkable

elxr 7mo ago
They'd need another 30 full time devs for that.
mattcantstop 7mo ago
Makes sense to me. It's a marketing page. Know your audience.
Hamuko 7mo ago
The “S” in “Glaze” stands for “security”.

smusamashah 7mo ago

It will be awesome if these were native apps instead of JavaScript apps. It's not mentioned anywhere explicitly that these are native.

mglvsky 7mo ago

what about barebone/starter desktop app that can be modified itself by prompts? that's would be Electron app, but without unneeded bloat

bpavuk 7mo ago

so many unknowns... 1. macOS and Windows require installation of Xcode and Visual Studio respectively, and if in Apple's case you kinda can install these tools headlessly and choose to install only the "build tools" package, Microsoft's creature is gonna daze and confuse you with a crap-ton of checkboxes and no easy "just install whatever is minimally needed to compile my code" button, and I don't recall if there is way to install build tools on Windows through terminal. 2. what is going to be distributed? source code itself or actual binaries? and what will the security model of Glaze store be? same as extensions, "everything is open-source and undergoes Raycast's and community review"? 3. Glaze is going to come to Windows and Linux, if we trust the Q&A section at the end. what will Glaze build upon? separate frameworks and languages for each platform or something multi-platform [1] like Tauri or Kotlin Multiplatform? or are you going to copy the Raycast extension model - just run Node, expose some platform integration, and parse React render trees through "Glaze Runtime"? I've been working on a bug in Vicinae [2][3], and I've seen this model in action. it's very hard to make it perform well, but all it takes to achieve native look and feel is to just map React render trees to whatever system component OS offers. (in Vicinae's case, it's Qt. bet that it's done with SwiftUI on macOS and WinUI 3 on Windows.) [1]: there is a difference between "cross-platform" and "multi-platform". "cross-platform" means "I behave equally across platforms and have no awareness of native look and feel" (e.g. Electron, Unity, Flutter), while "multi-platform" means "I can adapt across platforms to the degree you need" (e.g. C/C++, Rust, KMP) [2]: https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae [3]: https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae/pull/1158 https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae/pull/1158

danpalmer 7mo ago
I think we can make assumptions for all of these. Raycast extensions aren't compiled code, and run within the Raycast runtime/engine. I'd bet that this is exactly the same. In many ways that's the same as Chrome apps, they have no code, they're just the Chrome binary, so there aren't any code signing issues.

robinhood 7mo ago

Impressive feat. Definitely not for me though, and for sure I won't be there to debug one of these when my parents will call me because it broke their computers.

sporksmith 7mo ago

I thought this must be a joke at first. "Glaze" is in pretty heavy use as recent slang for "when someone excessively praises another person in a way that feels over-the-top." https://creativesimiles.com/glaze-meaning-slang/ https://creativesimiles.com/glaze-meaning-slang/ ie the annoying way that LLMs interact with users

giraffe_lady 7mo ago
Maybe a quietly dissenting PM snuck it by. If so, nice.
titanomachy 7mo ago
"Heavy use" to the point where it might even be more common than the older senses of "cover with icing" or "install windows".
ultropolis 7mo ago
It's so much worse. Your link fails to mention that the "Glaze" in question is a cough bodily fluid. Yes that one. Have I seen politicians use "glaze" recently? Yes. Gross. On the other hand it is kind of the perfect name for Yet Another AI Website Maker (YAAWM?).
- junofan 7mo ago
  Nah it’s from Dunkin Donuts [1]. > First you said all you want is love and affection / Let me be your angel and I'll be your protection / … / Thought I was a donut, you tried to glaze me > I ain’t gotta tell you I had a Dunkin' Donuts fetish back in the day. I used to get a dozen donuts every day, man. So it was one of the things that was on my mind [1]: https://genius.com/1716467 https://genius.com/1716467
- apt-apt-apt-apt 7mo ago
  It's worse than that, the glaze is only the by-product of the primary action in question.
- __float 7mo ago

irenetusuq 7mo ago

[dead]

sangeeth96 7mo ago

Looking forward to trying this out and see how this differs from more manual approaches. One thing that stands out is an included store for public/private distribution — that’s super convenient given the cumbersome (and maybe, horrific) process that is the app store submission.

freetonik 7mo ago

Ironically, there's another project named Glaze, that aims to "protect artists from generative AI" (https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/ https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/)

ZeWaka 7mo ago
There's also a window(s) tiling manager named Glaze that's pretty popular: https://github.com/glzr-io/glazewm https://github.com/glzr-io/glazewm

geooff_ 7mo ago

This is just a landing page. There's not even any decent product specs. Nothing technical. How does this make front page of hacker news?

deleted 7mo ago
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_pdp_ 7mo ago

How many apps do you really need that are not already done - perhaps even better?

hombre_fatal 7mo ago
I've vibe coded all sorts of apps for my macbook. A better replacement to iStat Menus. A local-only voice to text whisper.cpp transcriber I can globally use while holding ctrl-semicolon. A menubar app that manages blocky and can easily turn it off or change dns. A tool like hammerspoon but I configure it via nix-darwin and it has no cruft. All of these are apps that use 30MB memory and are better than the apps they replace, and I can make changes any time I want. That's far better than using someone else's software and giving it privileged access to my machine. Also, perhaps the best point is that so much software is junk that is obsoleted by someone with better UX intuitions even if they are vibe-coding it. Being written by hand by an engineer means basically nothing when it comes to "is this a good app?" Which is why product-minded people are the biggest winners in the new AI era.
- ukuina 7mo ago
  Neat! What does the stack look like?
  - hombre_fatal 7mo ago
    Swift + AppKit. No Xcode. For less trivial apps, use Elm architecture for a pure, testable core.
WarmWash 7mo ago
The problem that software suffers from is that every app/program tries to cover as many bases and use cases as possible in a single package. Obviously it's what you want to do if you want to maximize reach/customers. Vibe apps are different. They do exactly what you want, exactly the way you want it done. No more downloading an app that is mysteriously 180MB and requires watching a youtube video to learn how to make it change your background every 5 minutes to different dog pictures.

jFriedensreich 7mo ago

Just what absolutely no one needed: another locked down and non web platform with horrific security that tries to digitally enslave people just the tiniest level above what they can accept now. I don’t see any future where raycast can survive and i would say its a good thing.

adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
I understand some of the skepticism towards this product, but are you saying this will somehow negatively impact Raycast (the company)? Raycast the tool is incredibly useful, so I'm surprised to see this sentiment.
- jFriedensreich 7mo ago
  I am saying its as toxic as the main product of raycast and they got away with it in a world where people could not replicate apps and 100 plugins they use in days. There is zero possibility anyone i know will tolerate a locked ecosystems like this any longer than absolutely needed.

paxys 7mo ago

There seem to be more AI app building platforms than actual apps being built these days.

deleted 7mo ago
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ljlolel 7mo ago

Getting closer to ClaudeVM https://jperla.com/blog/claude-electron-not-claudevm https://jperla.com/blog/claude-electron-not-claudevm

kneel25 7mo ago

So it looks like they’re creating their own App Store within the app? At least it’s kept separate from official apps. But also how is that not a security nightmare Apple won’t allow?

dcchambers 7mo ago

I love Raycast. I would probably be called a "power user" - I use it all day long and have a fairly sophisticated and customized configuration and set of workflows. Raycast is actually one of the primary things keeping me on MacOS these days (please release a Linux version!). I am worried this is the start of them trying to diversify their product offering because revenue has stalled in the core Raycast product and VC demands more returns. I don't want to be jaded, but history teaches me to be. Here's hoping that Raycast itself is still a focus for the company.

enpl992 7mo ago
[dead]

dpweb 7mo ago

Have had good results on MacOS just using codex (or your cli of choice). Have it create a swift app, unless extended permissions are needed it can compile withouy going into xcode. Few simple util apps, disk cleaner, clipboard manager. Worked pretty well. Had better results than using xcode's built in ai extension.

HaloZero 7mo ago

But can it manage external libraries or use only the existing sdk? I had a non tech friend run into an issue recently where she wanted to automate a pdf action. Eventually I realized she needed to run homebrew and install a library. Curious if this actually manages that kind of process.

cdrnsf 7mo ago

I can't imagine trusting these apps with access to my camera, file system or any other sensitive permissions.

b450 7mo ago

Might sound like a rube here, but: is agentic development really this good at novel UIs? The video shows a sort of cassette tape music player, and a fancy looking audio visualizer/equalizer thing. I'm well aware agents are very good at boilerplate UIs, but I wouldn't expect them to be able to one-shot novel, dynamic UI elements like this. I've had Claude attempt some SVG animations and the results were very crude. That was a year or so ago though. Are there established ways of letting agents iterate on UIs, i.e. having them visually verify the visual design and interactions?

marcus_holmes 7mo ago
I had the same results a year ago. Everything has changed since ~Nov 25, give it another go and you'll be surprised
adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
Hooooo, boy, if you haven't used Opus 4.5/4.6, do yourself a favor and check it out. It's pretty good. My experience has been that Opus consistently generates UIs that are genuinely good. As always with anecdata, YMMV. There's a reason Tailwind Plus has revenue problems right now.

break_the_bank 7mo ago

It is interesting how so many different companies end up converging to some sort of AI coding. Raycast -> Glaze AirTable -> Lovable Competitor Retool -> Lovable Competitor Even those early in the journey are converging towards coding.

kylehotchkiss 7mo ago

Is this just shitting out electron crap?

Mongoose 7mo ago

Not to be a curmudgeon, but why are they spending time on this? As an enthusiastic Raycast user, I would prefer to see them focus on making Raycast better, not finding new ways to jump on the AI bandwagon.

femiagbabiaka 7mo ago
the first scenario that came to mind is that they built it for themselves and then open sourced it
lintimes 7mo ago
I had the same reaction. They've had Raycast releases paused for some time to focus on large feature improvements, but I wondered if it was partly for this.
mamaluigie 7mo ago
Welp this is what happens when the USA is spending more into this than it did in the space race comparatively. Space race we got to the moon, the AI output has yet to show profit from businesses other than funding the input.
threecheese 7mo ago
This seems a natural evolution of Raycast Extensions (which are an evolution of Script Commands) - given the current landscape (generative everything). I would be surprised if there’s no “Raycast inside” within and around the new toolchain. I’m torn about what this likely means for iOS; while I do want to do Raycast-y things in my phone, I’m not sure there’s enough of us to make a business out of it.
nsonha 7mo ago
I am an Raycast user and I see them improving Raycast (while working on this) including the AI features that I do use, so...
AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
More moneys.

mabedan 7mo ago

I don't understand how these type of projects are still tried and get any traction... anyone who has tried them will 100% know it won't go beyond a happy path demo. If they want to seriously use/publish the app beyond playing around, it'll require weeks of iteration via AI, which will cost you an arm and a leg in tokens.

caro_kann 7mo ago
I haven't used v0 or replit before, I have the same feelings as you. But I've been thinking about building macOS apps for my personal use for a long time now. Also I'm a long time Raycast user. I have a bias here, so I've joined the waitlist, I can't be sure until I try, right?
- ricketycricket 7mo ago
  Just build Mac apps then. Claude Code can help you whip up real native apps without any Glaze dependencies just fine. I’ve built 4 Mac and iOS apps in the last 6 months for my own use. I even have my own HN app for iOS and Mac.
  - theturtletalks 7mo ago
    Even if you don't like Electron, I was able to get Claude to build Electrobun and Tauri apps as well. I don't understand what benefit Glaze will bring outside of more lock-in?
thomaspaulmann 7mo ago
Founder of Raycast here so obviously biased but you’ll be surprised. You get a working app one-shotted pretty much all the time. Sure if it is something more complex you might need a few more prompts. Just to give you some examples on what we’ve seen: - Our support team runs on Glaze apps to review Raycast extensions. It connects to GitHub, checks out code locally, gets realtime updates and so on. - The sound agency build a functioning synthesiser for the launch video. It works even with MIDI. - We’re about to cancel a team-wide subscription and replace it with a Glaze app. Not everything is possible yet and sure more complex things need more prompts but you’ll be surprised what Glaze is capable of already. It’s day one…

etchalon 7mo ago

Vibe-coding desktop apps is a much, much better solution for the vast majority of one-off tools most users want to build.

Imnimo 7mo ago

My metric for this kind of stuff is: Did Glaze build the Glaze app?

1propionyl 7mo ago

No thanks. As an interesting counter-proposal to wasting time with this... look for older less popular/downloaded/featureful apps written by people for their own education, edification and enjoyment. They may not work the way you wish they would, but you can learn a lot from them, be inspired by them, and leave feedback. That's how you actually encourage more people to get started and continue making their own tools.

imfing 7mo ago

I like the idea! Similar to how openclaw is exploring a “personal agent” that runs on your computer, this feels like a step toward personal software - tools that live locally, understand the context, and adapt to how we actually work. Excited to see how this evolves, feels like an interesting direction.

throw03172019 7mo ago

This is so far from Raycast’s core product offering, I’m confused. Pivot?

danpalmer 7mo ago
Raycast has always been chasing being a business process automation tool, not an app launcher. They have team subscriptions, team-wide distribution of automations in the launcher, so it feels like team-wide custom apps to automate further business processes is a natural extension of this. Whether that's what you want from Raycast as an individual user or not though is a fair question. I was a heavy user, but I recently switched back to Alfred. I love both, and there are things I think Raycast does much better than Alfred, but ultimately I'm not the target market for Raycast and I was feeling for a year or so that I was swimming upstream on my usage of it.

steve_adams_86 7mo ago

This is incredible, and I'm excited by this technology. I also feel like it's irresponsible to allow laypeople to potentially inject dangerous code into literal black box programs. This should come with a much clearer disclaimer that it could be dangerous to use it. I get that we've all been running homebrew and npm and so on without auditing every package, but there, there was some semblance of a trust mechanism and distributed review if something went wrong. Here we have totally unreviewed code running with no trust mechanism in place whatsoever. No public releases, no audit trail, no versioned releases, no community eyes on anything. Weird times

YVoyiatzis 7mo ago

As a Raycast user, I have to say the devs built something incredibly sleek and stable. It genuinely makes macOS feel like a pro-level OS. For the developers: will Glaze replace Raycast, or are they meant to run concurrently?

throwaway613746 7mo ago

[dead]

diebillionaires 7mo ago

i can get an app one shotted pretty much every time i use cline too. why would i ever use a proprietary solution that’s opinionated and likely eventually costs (idk i didn't look)? add this to the bubble theory

threecheese 7mo ago

As a Raycast paying user, I was a little bent that they have apparently not been focusing on the core product. However, having just vibe coded an actually useful Raycast extension, I can see wanting to bring this capability to a wider audience - and how this could scale their core product adoption beyond “nerds who think Spotlight stinks”. Which is getting A lot of good (if negative) comments ITT though; it’s going to be tough for them to bring this to market safely.

snickerbockers 7mo ago

Why is this called raycast when it doesn't appear to have anything to do with graphics or euclidean geometry?

pembrook 7mo ago

Raycast didn't raise $10B so they clearly aren't building their own model. So this is just another Codex/Cursor/Vscode but with different branding to target MacOS apps? Is there any novel features or is it literally just a pure play branding/packaging exercise over the openai/anthropic API to trick normies? I'm starting to get even more negative on AI coding tools...somehow they provide even less value-add than the trivial AI copywriting apps. At least the writing apps have to contend with building a text editor and workflows around collaboration/approval/publishing, which is actually a real value-add over the raw model API. But I've yet to find a coding tool with a moat given there's zero workflow differentiation even for large teams -- collaboration, approvals and pushing to prod is all handled by git either way!

outlore 7mo ago

The framing (and name) of this company (subsidiary?) is a bit unfortunate. If this had been built as a natural extension to the Raycast API, with the advertised benefit of being able to create desktop applications, I think it would go over a lot better than presenting it as a different product altogether that dilutes the main offering

LoganDark 7mo ago

Until something happens that disproves this, my personal belief is that supervision and manual review is one of the best ways to use a coding agent. You don't need to understand everything it does, but you will benefit from a technical background and from at least surface-level knowledge or intuition about what it spits out. I review every diff Claude Code applies and periodically re-review entire projects as a whole. Through this, I've managed to keep architectures fairly principled with future expansions in mind. I recently managed to essentially two-shot an MLX implementation of a working forward pass for a diffusion language model, based on CUDA source code that is not compatible with my machine. There's more work needed before it's anywhere usable in practice, but the fact that the model is now running at all on my machine is a very impressive start. For that, I had it study the CUDA source code and write a very detailed document with its analysis of exactly how the model is implemented. This document only had one material flaw. Then it studied MLX for a while and spat out a running forward pass based on the flawed document. The output wasn't of sufficient quality, so I had it insert debug prints throughout the whole inference process to see where it was going wrong. It found and fixed the forward pass and the flaw in the document. I needed no domain experience in LLMs or DLMs for this (although I benefit from some minor past contributions to RWKV.cpp). Another example is that I recently started getting into SwiftUI, and Claude Code is doing a very good job at demonstrating code patterns and pointing me towards APIs that may solve my problems. It also helped me set up things like API clients (which itself, of course, gave me pointers to all the sorts of documentation I'd benefit from reading in full). I reject a very large fraction of its suggestions, I tweak its plans very frequently and I tell it off a lot from things that either are unidiomatic or are objectively terrible hacks. But it is incredibly useful for menial work, for enumerating possibilities, for quickly scaffolding placeholder content, and for demonstrating patterns I haven't learned yet as they apply to my specific situation. For example, Claude Code quickly learned me how to use NSViewRepresentable, whereas in a past project where I didn't use LLMs, I absolutely struggled to embed a Metal view. But all that is to say that I'm skeptical of solutions that try to have you describe your idea in plain language; that try to insulate you from the code; or that make the lie that you just don't have to worry about it. If you work at all on the kinds of projects I work on, which are chock-full of reverse engineering and an obsessive focus on tightly-controlled design and idiomatic code, I firmly believe that treating the code like a black-box is not the way to do it. I don't know if Glaze truly hides the code, but I don't see any mention of it in the trailer video and that makes me feel a little dismissive.

zarcaxm 7mo ago

Is it's a futuristic teaser and an enjoyable one. But I don't get this focus on "Making Apps". These things been around for like 6 years, why am I still using apps that already existed before ?

nusl 7mo ago

I think it's time for me to move on from Raycast. It's decent, but I genuinely hate this direction. Shove AI in to every orifice, doesn't matter if anyone wants it. I guess they're trying to make more money and Raycast is a bit of a dead-end there.

deleted 7mo ago
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lunias 7mo ago

So... can you explain why I wouldn't just use my own models and workflow? What does Glaze actually do? It looks like it has a private and public "store" where you can upload your apps? Can you explain to me how this is different than say, uploading my source / binaries to a server which is connected to the internet?