Vibe coding has escaped the terminal
Platformer Casey Newton
Raycast's new app Glaze lets you build full Mac apps just by describing what you want, no terminal needed. One writer made a comic-themed to-do list and a research tool in days, no coding required.
Based on reporting by Platformer, Casey Newton — read the original for the full story.
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Vibe coding started in the terminal, all typed commands and Markdown files that worked fine but looked like nothing. Raycast's new app Glaze wants to drag that whole habit onto the desktop, literally. Announced back in March and opened to everyone last week after a beta run that started with a June invite, Glaze is built specifically for making and sharing Mac apps, not general-purpose scripting. It's not alone in this lane — Wabi does the same thing for mobile — but for anyone who lives on a laptop, an app that spits out actual desktop software feels like the more obvious itch to scratch.
The pitch is speed plus polish. Glaze starts you off with a working Mac app template instead of a blank prompt, compiles and installs what you build automatically, and calls image-generation models on its own, something Claude Code can't do. The bigger shift is interaction: you can edit an app while it's running, even circling a specific element on screen to tell the coding agent what to change. That live-editing loop is what separates this from typing into a chat window and hoping.
One early build was a to-do app themed around the DC hero Nightwing, complete with generated images of the character doing chores and comic-book animations when tasks get checked off. Ridiculous, sure, and probably a copyright headache for whichever model is generating those images. But it made chores fun in a way no previous to-do app managed, and it took a fraction of the effort software like this used to demand.
More useful was a Platformer-branded app that runs semantic searches over years of archived columns using an Anthropic API key, surfaces recurring topics and people as clickable chips, and pulls in recent columns and old quotes on its home screen. Where a similar Claude Code setup required launching a terminal and invoking a skill every time, this one just lives in the dock. A third project, a contacts app meant to merge phone and LinkedIn contacts into something like a private CRM, is still unfinished, tangled up in privacy questions and design indecision.
Glaze's own store, where users can publish and browse apps, is populated mostly with practical, forgettable stuff — PDF readers, subscription trackers, usage monitors. The free tier comes with a one-time batch of credits good for an app or two; after that it's a $20-a-month Pro plan with 200 credits refreshing monthly, plus the option to buy more.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Cheap, fast app-building tools like this are less about replacing the App Store and more about killing the excuse that bad software has to stay bad. If something is ugly, boring, or built for someone else's workflow, people no longer have to just live with it — they can rebuild it around themselves in an afternoon. That's a real shift, even if most of what gets made with it, at least for now, is gloriously pointless.
Read more about this at: Platformer
