Raycast CEO Thomas Paul Mann predicts 30 to 50 percent of the software on your Mac will be software you built yourself within three years. His new tool, Glaze, launched publicly on July 1. Describe an app in plain English, it builds a real Mac app. Works offline, lives in your dock, ships to a public store or a private team. Raycast has raised more than $47 million from Accel, Coatue, and Atomico. Mann and co-founder Petr Nikolaev met at Facebook and built Raycast in three months through Y Combinator's winter 2020 batch.
Mann's critique of commercial software is the sharpest part of this conversation. His argument: companies chase growth, pile on features, and the product starts working against you. Glaze is the counter-proposal, apps built for exactly one person. He has done this three times now: Spark AR at Facebook, 3,000 open-source extensions on Raycast, and now Glaze. Platformer's Casey Newton has already built a searchable archive of his columns and a Nightwing-themed to-do list on the platform. He calls the archive genuinely useful. He calls the to-do list unnecessary and fun.
Two concrete things are coming. Glaze Pro subscribers will get direct access to language models and image generation through their subscription within weeks, ending the workaround of plugging in personal API keys. Mann also broke from the standard AI-and-jobs script: he argues junior and senior engineers benefit most from AI, while mid-level engineers are in a difficult position. Glaze is also running a $10,000 contest for the best app built on the platform. The full conversation is worth reading for Mann's structural argument about why personalized software beats commercial software at the edges.
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