The case for making your own apps

**Casey Newton** (0:00)
What if you could make a Mac app just by snapping your fingers? That is the promise behind Glaze, a new app from the makers of Raycast. Founder Thomas Paul Mann is here. That's This Week on Platformer.
This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian, where teams and coding agents get the context they need to do the right work. Try it free at jira.dev. That's J-I-R-A dot D-E-V.
Welcome to Platformer, I'm Casey Newton. This week we're asking whether the best productivity tool might just be the one you make for yourself. Our guest is Thomas Paul Mann, the co-founder and CEO of Raycast, and the maker of Glaze, a new tool that builds custom Mac apps from a plain English description using AI. I reviewed it in Platformer earlier this month. I've been having a blast with it. And today I get to ask Thomas all about what he is building and what are the implications of anyone being able to make their own software. Are they going to do it? What are they going to do with it? What should you do with it? First though, as always, we begin by checking in on the state of AI and jobs. So let's bring in Platformer fellow and Gen Z AI correspondent, Ella Markianos. Ella, how are you this week?

**Ella Markianos** (1:31)
I'm doing well. How are you?

**Casey Newton** (1:33)
I am doing great. I know you got to enjoy a little time off. Was that restful and restorative for you?

**Ella Markianos** (1:41)
It was like 95% restful. I would say I went to Yosemite. It was beautiful. I had a great, absurdly offline time.
Which is very nice. But I was also cooking with my mom the whole time. And we both have very alpha management styles when it comes to cooking. You know, it wasn't like my normal workflow where a lot of my conversation happens with Claude who does what I say all the time. Right.

**Casey Newton** (2:13)
You're finding that mom is a little bit less sycophantic than Claude, at least on the subject of cooking.

**Ella Markianos** (2:19)
Yeah. I am also now remembering my mom watches all of these. So shout out. I love you. It was very fun.

**Casey Newton** (2:27)
We're going to go deeper with Ella about her relationship with her mom on the next episode. So that's something to look forward to.
But in the meantime, we should talk about AI and jobs. And I believe that we have a story about maybe someone else that's trying to delegate work and having a challenge with it this week. Is that right, Ella?

**Ella Markianos** (2:49)
Basically, this new story we're seeing for the first time, a big union of workers strike about potentially being replaced with robots.

**Casey Newton** (2:59)
Tell us about this one.

**Ella Markianos** (3:01)
Yeah. So Hyundai has been developing this new humanoid robot with Boston Dynamics, who many of us know for what we thought were the cute little robot dogs from 10 years ago.

**Casey Newton** (3:15)
And I never thought they were cute for what it's worth. I always thought that they were going to possibly kill us. But yes, I do definitely know the name.

**Ella Markianos** (3:26)
I assume you have different intuitions here, but maybe you were right.
So basically, in January at a trade show, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics unveiled this new robot, which is a version of their humanoid created for manufacturing and specifically manufacturing of their cars. And since then, Hyundai's union has demanded, as part of negotiations, protections for potentially being replaced by these robots, which is kind of a first.

**Casey Newton** (4:02)
Yeah. I mean, so this, I feel like, is one of those stories that we've just been waiting to see. A big manufacturer brings in a robot, starts to be able to do what the people can do. Tell us a little bit about this robot first. Like, what is it, what can it do, and how big of a threat might it be to the Hyundai workers?

**Ella Markianos** (4:23)
Yeah. So it's called Atlass. It's 6'3, 198 pounds. Is it single?
It's, unfortunately, its maximum lift is only 110 pounds instantly. You know, I can lift more than that. But, you know, there are a lot of other parts within that range. Basically, demos of it have shown it, for example, autonomously picking up and stacking auto parts, like taking it from one area of a floor to another. It's starting to be able to not just be teleoported, which is where a human controls it, but also do some kind of stacking, fulfillment, et cetera, tasks autonomously. It's not yet deployed. The CEO has in the past said that their plan is by 2028 They actually want them deployed in a plant in Georgia that's not unionized.