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Posted by romac 8 hours ago

Glaze by Raycast(www.glazeapp.com)
166 points | 99 comments
mabedan 3 hours 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.
thomaspaulmann 2 hours 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…

elxr 8 minutes ago|||
> You get a working app one-shotted pretty much all the time.

Can you one-shot a raycast alternative with this? This'll be the real test.

layer8 1 hour ago||||
So… could I one-shot a Glaze competitor? ;)

More seriously, what do you believe your moat is here?

general_reveal 52 minutes ago||
There will probably be a few of these like TextEditors. I already built this and have features in mind that I’m not sure Glaze is thinking of.
vintagedave 1 hour ago||||
This sounds promising. If I may take advantage of you being here, what language does it write in? Does it build genuine native apps (Cocoa, WinAPI or WinUI, etc) or Electron?

The FAQ was light on technical details. But I am someone keen to read all the technical details :)

gms 2 hours ago|||
Does it generate native apps, or just Electron?
caro_kann 2 hours 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?
twalichiewicz 8 hours 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.

pelagicAustral 6 hours ago||
I took a few shots at building desktop apps with Tauri, Wails and Electron using Claude Code, and the results were not very good at all. In fact, they were by far the worst results I've gotten with the tool. I can easily clone one of my boilerplate repos in Rails, or Django and prompt away, and the results are consistently good, as in, functional MVP in a few hours. This was never the case for the desktop tools I mentioned.

This looks like a highly specialized tool for desktop that actually works. I watch the demo and I am assuming the apps are actually made with some kind of technology a la Tauri, or Electron, thus making the apps cross-platform.

I don't think we are anywhere near a tool like this for native, but that's a lost battle anyway.

rev_vehicle 3 hours ago|||
I’ve had a totally different experience. I’ve coded 3 different Tauri apps and 1 Wails app with Claude Code and it was some of the easiest work I’ve done with AI assisted coding. That said, the local features that Rust is handling in the Tauri app is not anything heavy, just moving files around, some regex matching, and some SQLite stuff. All of the headache I had in these apps was the React frontends and Node issues. The Rust features all worked pretty much first try every time.
thewebguyd 5 hours ago||||
> I don't think we are anywhere near a tool like this for native, but that's a lost battle anyway.

I hope it's not a lost battle, tbh. I was hoping with AI & Vibe Coding we'd see sort of a resurgence of native first desktop apps, but so far it's just all been a continuation of the web app & web tech hegemony.

Maybe not for Windows as their native GUI story is a lost cause now, but for sure macOS and I had hopes of it leading to a renaissance of desktop linux apps in GTK instead of electron, but that (the Linux) community seems to be hostile to any AI generated code at all for now.

elxr 5 minutes ago|||
I have been seeing more and more native desktop apps in the past few months (octarine for instance), but most of them would've honestly been better off as web-apps, or at least a polished electron app.

> seems to be hostile to any AI generated code at all for now.

Because the majority of vibe-coded apps are low effort.

pelagicAustral 5 hours ago|||
Well, to be fair, I do have an experience working on a Windows Forms app from scratch. App connects to a very specific scanner via customs drivers and makes use of a remote API for data tasks. The app works, it's stable, but I'm not going to lie, AI assisted coding for this particular stack does require a very large amount of nurturing, it is just not the same experience you get with web apps. Nevertheless, it did it.
thewebguyd 4 hours ago||
Makes sense. There's plenty of freely available code and data online for using web tech. Any number of free online bootcamps spawned in the mid 2010s are full of "Become a React developer in 6 months" type of content.

Native, especially on Windows and macOS, have been the domain of proprietary apps there's not much code outside of tutorials online to train a model on outside of official documentation.

I made a couple of small menu bar utilities for mac using Gemini, and it was OK at best. Kept wanting to use deprecated APIs, but with a lot of handholding I got them to work.

Would be neat to see Apple put out their own model specifically for Swift/SwiftUI

mcintyre1994 5 hours ago||||
They say they're targeting Mac only for now, so it could be native code, or they could just have not tested/refined their prompt for other platforms yet.

> This was never the case for the desktop tools I mentioned.

I'd be curious how well Claude Code works for a native Swift app on macOS, if that's the platform you're on. I've found it extremely good at iOS apps so my guess is it would be equally good at building a native macOS app with the same stack.

Ronsenshi 4 hours ago||
I've tried using Codex and ChatGPT while working on a small SwiftUI app. It's not very good when it comes to newer APIs and features - I imagine due to lack of data about these things. Very often it would rather push something AppKit-based instead of SwiftUI.

It works, but feels really janky and messy.

I had one very annoying bug with file export API where extra view on export window would appear with a delay. No matter what I tried it didn't manage to fix it. Instead it would go on to try and completely rewrite whole file export class in various ways... which still didn't work as it claimed it would. Ended up fixing it manually by caching instance view locally.

azinman2 1 hour ago|||
Why not use SwiftUI or whatever is native to the platform?
tshaddox 7 hours 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.

mcintyre1994 5 hours ago|||
> 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.

I think it's fair to say that's a benefit of web apps over native apps in many cases. But for the kind of business app use case they're talking about, it's also a tradeoff. I can imagine a lot of business apps where you don't want to send the data to the server of a Replit etc. and doing all the processing local is a benefit.

general_reveal 50 minutes ago|||
You mean “fork” other apps.
varun_ch 7 hours ago|||
A big thing would be API requests/browser automation. Web apps can’t do that without a backend proxy due to CORS
nateb2022 7 hours 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.

twalichiewicz 7 hours ago||
I can certainly see that. If they really did manage to make some really effective design tooling, would be a great candidate for an MCP server.
jeroenhd 7 hours ago||
> Pretty sure modern web apps can do all of those

If you're on Chrome and give them permission, or stuff them into Electron and friends, they can. The workflow isn't as smooth as with native applications, though.

On the other hand, the web browser does protect you from some of the risks this essentially "trust me bro" curl2bash-as-a-service product inherently comes with.

freetonik 7 hours ago||
Ironically, there's another project named Glaze, that aims to "protect artists from generative AI" (https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/)
ZeWaka 2 hours ago|
There's also a window(s) tiling manager named Glaze that's pretty popular: https://github.com/glzr-io/glazewm
lorenzoguerra 8 hours 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 7 hours 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.
ftchd 3 hours 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.

s__s 4 hours ago|||
Can you explain how the permission model works?
b450 4 hours 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?
Mongoose 3 hours 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.
mamaluigie 2 hours 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.
lintimes 3 hours 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.
femiagbabiaka 3 hours ago||
the first scenario that came to mind is that they built it for themselves and then open sourced it
foo4u 8 hours 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.

dewey 3 hours 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 2 hours 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.
mrklol 7 hours ago|||
Same thought I had while reading, don’t really see a big advantage here.
kylehotchkiss 4 hours ago||
Thank you for your service.

We need more of you. Not more electron slop.

prodigycorp 8 hours 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.

mgrandl 7 hours 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.
freetonik 7 hours ago|||
>Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play.

Raycast recently made a Windows version. So perhaps they aren't as Apple-centric.

rafram 7 hours 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.)

mcintyre1994 5 hours ago||
A similar product in the mobile space is Rork - I haven't used it but I've seen it on twitter a bit. I definitely wouldn't be surprised to see Apple acquire one of them.
HaloZero 6 hours 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.
Imnimo 1 hour ago|
My metric for this kind of stuff is: Did Glaze build the Glaze app?
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