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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.
By thomaspaulmann 2026-03-0419:167 reply 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…
So… could I one-shot a Glaze competitor? ;)
More seriously, what do you believe your moat is here?
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.
By layer8 2026-03-052:35 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.
By general_reveal 2026-03-0421:04 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.
By theturtletalks 2026-03-050:40 They also plan on having their own app store where you publish these glaze apps and maybe they charge commission for paid apps down the line?
By layer8 2026-03-0423:26 Sure, but from the FAQ, “Paid plans start at $20/month”.
By Archit3ch 2026-03-0422:08 > The sound agency build a functioning synthesiser for the launch video
Is it a real synth or license-washed Vital/Surge?
By vintagedave 2026-03-0420:14 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 :)
By pftburger 2026-03-057:41 Honestly Glaze is brilliant.
I assume there is an extensive set of rails for the agent to tie into. (Compare this to asking Claude to green fields an app. Do you use electron? How are notifications handled? Icons? Permissions?)
It springboard off Raycast’s teams feature so well it actually gives it a real reason to exist. You’re empowering the one systems thinker in the group to export their automations to the rest of the group in a way that’s proven to work: small apps that do one thing. (Big apps get complicated, become full time projects that distract from the task at hand)
Fig tried this but it was just for engineers, the value prop was missing, Glaze seems to get this right.
Very nicely done!
By elxr 2026-03-0421:48 > 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.
By zombot 2026-03-056:08 So is this self-hosted? Was this version of Glaze built with Glaze?
By lazerlapin 2026-03-0710:54 I think electron
By anonzzzies 2026-03-060:13 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)
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?
By ricketycricket 2026-03-0422:321 reply 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.
By theturtletalks 2026-03-050:42 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?
Ironically, there's another project named Glaze, that aims to "protect artists from generative AI" (https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/)
By ZeWaka 2026-03-0419:13 There's also a window(s) tiling manager named Glaze that's pretty popular: https://github.com/glzr-io/glazewm
By twalichiewicz 2026-03-0413:547 reply 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.
By pelagicAustral 2026-03-0415:364 reply 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.
By thewebguyd 2026-03-0415:562 reply > 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.
By pelagicAustral 2026-03-0416:091 reply 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.
By thewebguyd 2026-03-0417:06 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
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.
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
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?
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 :)
That's amazing, great job mate.
What's the number one place/site you got customers from?
By rajatkulk 2026-03-0511:21 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).
By rev_vehicle 2026-03-0418:53 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.
By mcintyre1994 2026-03-0416:081 reply 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.
By Ronsenshi 2026-03-0417:31 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.
By azinman2 2026-03-0420:00 Why not use SwiftUI or whatever is native to the platform?
By tshaddox 2026-03-0414:17 > 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.
By mcintyre1994 2026-03-0416:10 > 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.
By varun_ch 2026-03-0413:56 A big thing would be API requests/browser automation. Web apps can’t do that without a backend proxy due to CORS
> 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.
By twalichiewicz 2026-03-0414:24 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.
By jeroenhd 2026-03-0414:28 > 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.
By general_reveal 2026-03-0421:05 You mean “fork” other apps.
