Discussion

Desktop apps,reimagined by you.

lorenzoguerra: 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: 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.

sporksmith: 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/ie the annoying way that LLMs interact with users

giraffe_lady: Maybe a quietly dissenting PM snuck it by. If so, nice.

ultropolis: 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?).

peyton: 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

jFriedensreich: 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: 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.

jsheard: > https://creativesimiles.com/glaze-meaning-slang/Kids these days are always saying "snaoƨd" and "foʀarir"

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

Cthulhu_: Related, "glass" or "glassing" can also refer to stabbing someone in the face with broken glass or decimating a world in nuclear holocaust.

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

autoexec: > Written By Lucas GrayThere is no way a human wrote that page. If Lucas Gray even exists, he should probably reconsider that last image, and his life more generally.

s__s: Can you explain how the permission model works?

Mongoose: 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: the first scenario that came to mind is that they built it for themselves and then open sourced it

lintimes: 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.

foo4u: 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: 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.

mabedan: 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: 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?

thomaspaulmann: 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…

gms: Does it generate native apps, or just Electron?

vintagedave: 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 :)

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

1propionyl: 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.

marcelp_: 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.

imfing: 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.

layer8: So… could I one-shot a Glaze competitor? ;)More seriously, what do you believe your moat is here?

lyime: Moat? Maybe they built something they wanted?

layer8: Sure, but from the FAQ, “Paid plans start at $20/month”.

throw03172019: This is so far from Raycast’s core product offering, I’m confused. Pivot?

danpalmer: 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.

anentropic: Do you have a nice way to let it 'use the app' or receive visual feedback?I imagine that would help the process a lot

YVoyiatzis: 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?

ricketycricket: 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: 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?

threecheese: As a Raycast paying user, I was a little bent that they have apparently not been focusing on the core product. Frankly it shows, in retrospect.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 gettingA lot of good (if negative) comments ITT though; it’s going to be tough for them to bring this to market safely.

threecheese: 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.

b450: 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: I had the same results a year ago. Everything has changed since ~Nov 25, give it another go and you'll be surprised

nsonha: Sales are about distribution, they have a channel. This "moat" thing matters to unestablished start-ups a lot more. We should apply context while copy pasting arguments.

layer8: This just means that the existing sales channel would be their moat. Which can be a valid argument, though I don't remember having heard of Raycast before, so it isn't obvious to me. I was interested in hearing what they see as their moat here.

adamtaylor_13: 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.

pembrook: Raycast didn't raise $10B so they clearly aren't building their own model.So this is just another Codex/Claude Code/Cursor but with different branding around 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 these than even AI writing apps. At least the writing apps have to contend with building a text editor and workflows around collaboration, which is a value add over the APIs.But I've yet to find a coding tool with a moat given there's zero workflow novelty even for large teams -- you're just pushing to git either way!

dmbche: This has to be performance art

outlore: 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: 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.

zombot: So is this self-hosted? Was this version of Glaze built with Glaze?

dewey: Mostly because I'm still very new to it and I use it to publish the app to my phone. There's probably a way to do via CLI but for now it's easier to see progress and flip some config values in the UI if you don't know yet where all the files are.

zarcaxm: 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: 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.

realharo: This has to be intentional, right?

lunias: 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?

anonzzzies: What kind of application are you thinking off? We build fairly complex applications in days for our clients, from presentation to launch. These are not trivial applications or landing pages; accountancy, payments (banking), erp, hrm backends, portals and mobile apps.(using claude code max by the way)

nsonha: > Shove AI in to every orificeLike they can force you to use AI somehow? I'm not an AI holdover but I don't use any Raycast AI feature and everything is... fine? What's there to complain?

nsonha: 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: More moneys.

lazerlapin: I think electron

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.

twalichiewicz: 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: I took a few shots at building desktop apps with Tauri, Wails and Electron using Claude Code, and the results where 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.

thewebguyd: > 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.

mcintyre1994: > 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.

pelagicAustral: 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.

rev_vehicle: 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.

general_reveal: You mean “fork” other apps.

elxr: 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.

rajatkulk: Octarine dev here! Unfortunately the app doesn't work for the web given the architectural decisions.Also the app's been around for over 3 years now, and isn't vibe coded (since I saw it in this thread around vibe coding apps).Open to any feedback if you've been using it for a while

elxr: Yup, I know it's been around for longer, probably wasn't the best example. But it's just the first native app I've thought of and with how much it's been changing, it constantly feels new.I do like most of it, but the pace of upgrades is a bit too fast for me compared to obsidian, which feels more stable for now. There's also parts of the obsidian editor (the plain-text view, I never use preview mode) that just feels better than every other notes app I've tried so far. Although obsidian as a whole is something I'm also trying to move off of.Love the polish of octarine though. Has the revenue been decent so far?

rajatkulk: Ah the fast pace of updates is because I quit my startup job to go full time on this since last September! So it's a day job for me now, which means I don't need to only spend a few hours per weekend, and thus can get to my backlog faster!As for revenue, it did give me enough confidence to quit my day job (was pretty well paid for my country), and Octarine since the past 3 months, has exceeded that as well :)

elxr: That's amazing, great job mate.What's the number one place/site you got customers from?

rajatkulk: I wanna say reddit? But it's a mix of things, some users come from chatgpt, some from searching for competitors on google.I don't do marketing (I do a post on reddit once in 3 months or so for updates, but it doesn't get that much traction). Feel like it's word of mouth. Some of the early users told more people they knew, and they did the same.Now a ton of customers bring the name up in their reddit threads (like you did here), and that's generally it.I'd love for conversions to be higher compared to the install count, but it's still healthy for an indie project with a relatively higher price point (people are too used to free, or $19 products).