Vibe coding has escaped the terminal

**Casey Newton** (0:09)
This is Platformer Plus, I'm Casey Newton. The following column was created using a synthetic voice clone made by 11 Labs.
In today's episode, Vibe Coding has escaped the terminal. Adventures with Raycast's new app making app, Glaze. This is a column about AI. My fiance works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure at platformer.news.ethics.
I began the year with a flurry of vibe coding projects, starting by canceling my Squarespace account and building a new personal website, and proceeding to build a suite of tools for creating daily briefings, a journaling companion, and a platformer archive. The projects were so useful and so easy to create, that initially I did not spend much time thinking about how unattractive they were. Aside from the website, gorgeous, my new tools were either accessible through the terminal or markdown files, functional, but fugly. I've continued to use those tools intermittently. Over time, though, their lack of polish came to nag at me, and so I took notice when in March, Raycast announced Glaze, an all-in-one Vibe coding app for the Mac. Where most coding tools are programming generalists, Glaze was built with the express purpose of building and sharing desktop apps. It was not the first to this idea. Wabi, whose founder Eugenia Kuida, I interviewed here last month, does the same thing for mobile apps. But as someone who does most of my work on a laptop, I found Glaze more immediately appealing, particularly given Raycast's track record, its launcher app is one of my favorite and most used pieces of software. I added my name to the waitlist and forgot about it. Then at the beginning of June, my invitation showed up in my inbox. Last week, Glaze opened up to all users. It includes a free tier with a one-time bundle of credits that will let you build an app or two. After that, you'll need a pro subscription, $20 a month at launch, which refreshes with 200 credits monthly and lets you buy more if you run out. In my first month, I built three apps that I've been using to accomplish various tasks, all of them involve productivity in one sense or another, though only one has any practical utility that extends beyond what was already available in the App Store. Still, I have found the process of making Mac apps delightful, even when what I have made is extremely silly. And while ultimately my conclusions about the next generation of Vibe coding don't extend far beyond, it's fun to make things, it's fun to make things, and that has made me modestly more confident that there is a future for hyper-personalized software, at least in the short term.
So with that, here are a few notes on my early efforts to usher in the SaaSpocalypse. By far the most ridiculous app I have made so far is called Nightwing after the DC superhero. Recently, in an effort to watch less YouTube, I have begun reading a comic book or two before bed. My original comic book phase had taken place in middle school. I hadn't picked up a new one in 30 years. But something about the profusion of AI generated slop in all my social feeds had made me desperate to see and pay for some handmade human art. And so a couple months ago, I bought subscriptions to Marvel and DC's respective comic book apps and began digging into what I had missed. One superhero whose stories I found myself enjoying was Nightwing, Batman's original Robin, all grown up and leading a team of superheroes in various world-shaking conflicts. Around the time I got access to Glaze, I had the amazing terrible idea of creating a Nightwing-themed To-Do app. To-Do apps are the classic first vibe coding project, and there is almost never any good reason to make another one. I can't imagine anyone meaningfully improving on To-Doist. Still, I find myself changing To-Do apps roughly every six months for esthetic reasons, and for the relief that comes from starting fresh with a blank slate of projects. Within a few minutes of using Glaze, its advantages over a pure coding app like Claude Code became apparent, at least to a non-technical person like myself. Glaze starts with a working Mac app template, which lets you skip lots of prompting and scaffolding work. It compiles and installs the app automatically, another big time saver. It calls image generation models natively, which Claude Code doesn't. And perhaps most helpfully, you can edit your app while it's open, even drawing a circle around specific elements you want to change to guide the coding agent. You can publish your app to Glaze's store if you want, or browse other people's creations to find inspiration. For the most part, I have found apps in the store pretty boring. Featured suggestions include a PDF reader, a subscription tracker, and a Claude usage monitor. My Nightwing app is defiantly absurd by comparison. At the click of a button, I can generate an image of a Nightwing-esque character doing any task that's on my list. Sending an email, buying groceries, getting an MRI.