alt.hn

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.

by twalichiewicz

I do have prior experience developing for iOS but that was pre-swift.

by foo4u

I guess they're trying to make more money and Raycast is a bit of a dead-end there.

by nusl

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.

by prodigycorp

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

by steve_adams_86

I wonder what it is actually building. Tauri apps, maybe?

by mcjiggerlog

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.

by imfing

For the developers: will Glaze replace Raycast, or are they meant to run concurrently?

by YVoyiatzis

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.

by dpweb

  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) ...

Raycast -> Glaze AirTable -> Lovable Competitor Retool -> Lovable Competitor

Even those early in the journey are converging towards coding.

by break_the_bank

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

[3]: https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae/pull/1158

by bpavuk

that's would be Electron app, but without unneeded bloat

by mglvsky

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.

by LoganDark

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.

by dcchambers

add this to the bubble theory

by diebillionaires

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!

by pembrook

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.

by 1propionyl

ie the annoying way that LLMs interact with users

by sporksmith