The case for making your own apps
Platformer Casey Newton
Raycast's Thomas Paul Mann says within 3 years half your Mac apps could be ones you built yourself with AI. His new tool Glaze turns plain English into real, working desktop apps.
Based on reporting by Platformer, Casey Newton — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Casey Newton's latest Platformer podcast episode picks at an idea that sounds almost too convenient to be true: that the endless scroll of subscription apps clogging your phone and laptop is about to become optional. Newton tested the theory with Thomas Paul Mann, the German engineer-turned-CEO who built Raycast into the default Spotlight replacement for hundreds of thousands of Mac users, and who's now betting on something bigger with a tool called Glaze.
Glaze, which opened to everyone on July 1, lets you type a description of the app you want and get back an actual Mac application — one that sits in your dock, runs offline, and can be shared publicly or kept inside a team. Newton has used it to build a searchable archive of his own columns, a contacts manager, and, more whimsically, a to-do list that generates an image of the superhero Nightwing every time he finishes a task. One of those became a weekly habit. The other is pure indulgence. Mann seemed unbothered by either outcome, noting he's seen users build webcam posture-checkers and other oddly specific tools nobody would ever pitch to a VC.
Mann's argument is really about what happens to commercial software once growth incentives take over. Companies keep bolting features onto their apps to win new users, he says, until the original tool gets buried under bloat — his phrase was that little utilities turn into
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I'm skeptical every household ends up vibe-coding its own Reminders app, but Mann's read on bloat is dead right, and it's the same rot that made open-source extensions and plugin ecosystems appealing before AI ever entered the chat. The real story isn't personalized software for the masses — it's that Raycast quietly built a second business model out of watching people hack their own tools, which is a more durable moat than another chatbot wrapper. Still waiting for someone to explain why my inbox needs a Nightwing cameo, though.
Read more about this at: Platformer
