Glaze by Raycast: Build Native Mac Apps With AI (2026)

Raycast released Glaze on July 1, 2026, an AI-powered tool that generates native Mac apps from plain English descriptions, compiling them through Xcode into installable .app bundles that run offline with full system access. Glaze hit #1 on Product Hunt within 48 hours, distinguishing itself from web-app builders by producing apps with system-wide keyboard shortcuts, file system access, and background processes. The tool requires macOS Tahoe and Apple Silicon, with a free tier of 120 credits and Pro at $20/month for 200 credits.

Raycast shipped something that shouldn’t work this well. Glaze https://www.glaze.app/ — released publicly on July 1 — takes a plain English description and produces a real native Mac app: compiled through Xcode, installed in your dock, runs offline. Not a web app. Not an Electron wrapper. An actual .app bundle with full access to your file system, keyboard shortcuts, menu bar, and background processes. It hit 1 on Product Hunt https://www.producthunt.com/products/glaze-4 within 48 hours. The Raycast team has been building polished Mac software for six years, and Glaze is where that expertise meets the current AI moment. Why This Is Different From Every Other AI App Builder The AI app-building landscape is crowded with tools that generate web apps living on someone else’s server — Lovable, Bolt, v0, Stitch all fit this pattern. Glaze doesn’t. When Glaze finishes building your app, you get a .app bundle that installs to /Applications and launches from your dock. No server subscription required to keep it running. No browser tab to babysit. That distinction unlocks capabilities the browser-based builders simply cannot touch: - System-wide keyboard shortcuts - Persistent menu bar residence - Full file system read and write access - Background processes that run while you work on something else - Complete offline operation - Direct access to local CLI tools and MCP servers These are developer superpowers. A web app can’t register a global hotkey. A web app can’t watch your local git repository and surface dirty branch state in your menu bar. Glaze apps can. How the Workflow Actually Works The process is straightforward. You open Glaze, describe what you want, and an AI agent — running Claude Code or OpenAI Codex under the hood — writes the Swift code, compiles it through Xcode command-line tools, and installs the binary. The whole cycle takes 60-90 seconds for simple apps. Iteration happens in the same chat thread. Ask it to add a feature, tweak the UI, or connect to an external service. The agent handles Linear, Notion, GitHub, local CLIs, and MCP servers. You’re not writing code — you’re steering an agent that writes, compiles, and installs on your behalf. One of the more interesting early examples: Raycast’s own support team built a GitHub-connected app to manage extension review workflows. Another developer published a working synthesizer to Glaze’s public store — the same synthesizer used to create sounds for the launch video. Teams at Cursor, Linear, and Vercel are already running Glaze-built internal tools. What’s in the Glaze App Store Right Now Glaze ships with a public app store and private team stores. The public catalog includes a live sports score tracker, a Tesla solar production monitor, a distraction-free terminal for running parallel AI agents, and a full synthesizer. Thousands of apps were built during the private beta. In most categories you’ll find something to fork before building from scratch. The store model is smart. It creates a distribution layer that turns Glaze from a personal toy into a team tool. Your finance team builds a dashboard and shares it internally. A developer builds a git utility and publishes it publicly. The platform gets more useful with every app someone else builds. Requirements, Pricing, and the Wall for Some Developers Glaze requires macOS Tahoe and Apple Silicon . That means M-series Macs only. Intel Macs are excluded entirely — no workaround, no fallback. Windows and Linux support is planned with no committed timeline. Pricing is credit-based. The free tier gives you 120 one-time credits — enough to build two to four simple apps and evaluate whether the workflow fits your needs. Pro costs $20/month for 200 credits . Team is $30 per seat per month , also 200 credits per seat. Credits scale with app complexity: a quick tweak costs less than building from scratch. Unused subscription credits roll over one month; top-up credits are valid for three months. The pricing is reasonable for teams building internal tooling regularly. For individual developers who want to build one solid utility and stop paying, the math gets murkier. The free tier covers initial experimentation. Whether the ongoing credit consumption justifies Pro depends on how many apps you’re actively building and maintaining. What This Actually Means for Developers The “vibe coding” framing gets thrown around a lot, and it’s partially right — you’re describing behavior instead of writing code. But Glaze’s output isn’t throwaway prototypes. Teams at real companies are shipping internal tooling on it. That’s a different category from “I generated a landing page.” The broader pattern is what matters: Glaze is building the case for personal software . Apps built for one team’s workflow, running on their hardware, with no vendor dependency for continued operation. In an era where half the tools developers rely on get acquired and shut down, that’s not nothing. The Hacker News reaction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47247033 echoes this — developers recognize that offline-first, locally-compiled apps solve a different class of problem than hosted web builders. Raycast built the most-used productivity launcher on macOS by taking native development seriously. Glaze is them betting that the next generation of personal tools will be described, not coded. Based on the early adoption at Cursor, Linear, and Vercel, that bet looks solid. If you’re on Apple Silicon and macOS Tahoe, the free 120 credits are worth burning. Describe something you’ve wanted for your workflow for years and couldn’t justify building. That’s the pitch — and it mostly delivers. Read the full Raycast introduction https://www.raycast.com/blog/introducing-glaze or go straight to glaze.app https://www.glaze.app/ to get started.