This podcast touches on AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.

When I talked to Eugenia Kuyda for the Platformer podcast, she predicted that the long tail of subscription apps on your phone would soon disappear. There will no longer be a need for paid apps for meditation, nutrition tracking, or fitness, she argued, because anyone can now build one for themself. 

Kuyda is applying that hypothesis to Wabi, a smartphone app for making smartphone apps. But for the second episode of our miniseries on AI and productivity, I wanted to test her prediction on the platform where I spend the most time: my Mac desktop.

And I can’t think of a better person to test it with than Thomas Paul Mann. Thomas is the co-founder and CEO of Raycast, the launcher that has replaced Spotlight for hundreds of thousands of daily users, myself included. (And yes, he is a German man named Thomas Mann — and like the 20th-century novelist of the same name, he has chosen a life of writing. In his case, it's software.) 

Thomas Paul Mann spent more than a decade as a software engineer at a German research institute called the Fraunhofer Society before taking roles at Audi and Facebook. It was at Facebook that he met his co-founder, Petr Nikolaev. The duo were part of Y Combinator’s winter 2020 batch, and they built Raycast together in about three months. They’ve since raised more than $47 million from investors including Accel, Coatue, and Atomico.

On July 1, Raycast unveiled its second act, Glaze, to everybody. Describe the software you want in plain English, and Glaze builds you a real Mac app. It lives in your dock, works offline, and can be shared to a public app store or privately with your team. (I reviewed it in Platformer earlier this month.) So far with Glaze, I’ve built a searchable archive of every column I've written, an app for managing my contacts, and a to-do app that generates an image of the superhero Nightwing completing each of my tasks. The archive app has quickly become a tool I use every week; the to-do list app is both totally unnecessary and lots of fun.

This is now the third time Thomas has handed people tools to make their own tools. At Facebook he worked on Spark AR, the company's augmented reality platform; at Raycast, he built a platform that now includes more than 3,000 open-source extensions. "As soon as you give people a tool to create their own tools, it changes the equation," he told me. 

What I appreciated most in our conversation was Thomas' clear-eyed critique of commercial software. In his telling, most software is a compromise: companies chasing growth pile features onto their products until they begin to suck. "What started as a little tool suddenly becomes this glorious massive app that wants to do everything," he said — and "sometimes those apps get more in the way than they actually help." Glaze represents an effort to give people hyper-personalized software: apps built for a market of exactly one person, then remixed and shared from there. He predicts that within three years, 30 to 50 percent of the software on your Mac could be software you made yourself. "Everybody is a creator now," he said.

Thomas also made some news on the show: within the next few weeks, he said, Glaze Pro subscribers will be able to tap language models and image generation directly through their subscriptions. (Good news for people like me, who have been plugging in their own API keys to bring intelligence to their creations.) And when I asked my standing question about how I will affect jobs, he had a perspective I hadn’t heard yet. The engineers who benefit most from AI, he argues, are the most junior and the most senior, while the person in the middle is in "a bit of a weird spot." 

In the meantime, if you’re feeling competitive, Glaze just announced a $10,000 contest for the best app built on the platform. (I’m a volunteer judge … and I plan to be merciless.)

A long excerpt of our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length. Listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts — just search for Platformer — or watch it on YouTube at youtube.com/caseynewton. 

And let us know what you think — we welcome your feedback at casey@platformer.news.

Casey Newton: A question that journalists will often ask about a product like Glaze is: what is the weirdest thing you've seen someone build with it? But in this case, I wanted to be the person who built the weirdest thing with Glaze. So I used it to build a to-do list app themed around the superhero Nightwing, in which every task I complete creates an image of the superhero doing that task. Is that the weirdest thing you've seen so far, or does someone have me beat?

Thomas Paul Mann: I think it ranks pretty high. I've seen the app, and it's very, very weird — very personal, which we are absolutely fine with. That's the fun part about it. There was one other one which ranks pretty high as well: Somebody had a webcam running that was watching them, and if they had bad posture, it would give them a shout, and then they could work on that posture. That was even remotely useful, I guess.

Newton: Prior to Glaze, you spent six years building Raycast, this launcher that creates countless quality-of-life improvements across the computer. Raycast has a very dedicated fan base. What did building it teach you about what people want from their tools, and did it lead you directly to building Glaze?

Mann: Six years — time flies. What started as this little thing, a launcher where you can launch apps — we managed to squeeze in so many different features over six years and made it extremely powerful. And the stepping stone that really enabled us to grow, and brought in this amazing community, was having extensions. For a long time we built the majority of features, and at some point we realized we can't build all the things ourselves. So how can we twist it around and give people the opportunity to integrate with the tools they already use? Because sometimes we don't even have access to those tools, or we don't know them, quite frankly. So we built this extension ecosystem, where everybody can build an extension and publish it in the store, and that really took off. They're all open source — there are over 3,000, I think, by now, all on GitHub.

That was the moment where we felt like, huh, interesting: as soon as you give people a tool to create their own tools, it changes the equation. And that was all pre-AI. People had to actually write code, and we thought a lot about our API to make it ergonomic and easy to use for developers. That was one of the inspirations for Glaze, where we said: why stop at extensions for Raycast? Why not do full apps? And so here we are now.

Newton: It's interesting — I was reading some of your old writing, and I had seen you say at one point that one of your chief frustrations at Facebook was that every minute outside your code editor made your job worse. Which leads you to build Raycast, where you can command the whole computer from this one beautiful box. Walk me through the line from there to making Glaze, because it feels like you went from "there are too many tools, so we're going to shrink everything down to one" to "let's make a product that creates infinite tools."

Mann: Beaming back to my time at Facebook: I always felt, as an engineer myself by trade, that the most productive I can be is writing code, solving a problem, putting something out. So any moment I didn't spend in my code editor felt like I wasn't spending my time wisely. And the reality is you have a lot more tools to deal with, but they often aren't optimized for the people who only go into a tool every now and then and need to do something. Take issue trackers: as an engineer, I don't want all the fluff. I want to see what I have assigned, and I want to close those things. That's how much I care about it. And then there are probably 1,000 features that I never think of. So that was the inspiration for Raycast: we keep you in the flow, where you do your actual work, and we give you those little extensions that you can use quickly via keyboard shortcuts, so you don't need to open another app. It becomes muscle memory.

With Glaze, in a way, we go the other direction, as you said. We let you create way more apps, but the difference is those apps are hyper-personalized. In an ideal world, you build yourself the perfect to-do app for you — and this one happens to have a comic in there. For other people, it's something else. But they are your apps. They can connect to services, like your issue tracker of choice, and you can update it there. But it is your app, so you stay focused. You stay in your productive genius zone. That's where we think Glaze really shines.

Because what we've seen in software over the years is that new features get added to every app, everything gets bloated, everything gets more and more generic, because companies need to grow and attract new people. What started as a little tool suddenly becomes this glorious massive app that wants to do everything — but the actual people using it have very dedicated things they want to do, and quite frankly, sometimes those apps get more in the way than they actually help. So we thought: can we flip the equation around and give people the opportunity to do whatever they want, and the platform to do it? That's the connection between Raycast and Glaze — solving a similar problem from very different angles.

Newton: Do you have a guess at the end state here? Are we going to have fewer apps that do more, or more apps that do less?

Mann: I think that's the billion-dollar question right now. There are super apps popping up left and right with Codex and Claude, and then chatbots generally. Do we even have apps, or is everything just — we yap into our microphones and it does everything? I'm personally quite a visual thinker. I want to see the UI in front of me. I want to click buttons. We developed so many of those patterns over the years sitting in front of our computers that it's very hard for me to imagine all of this goes away and we're just sending text messages back and forth, talking and listening to something. Even when you work on something that's a bit deeper, you might want to whiteboard something. If you want to present certain ideas, you want to show a diagram that other people can grasp, and not a wall of text.

I think we're in a phase of figuring it out. There is no right or wrong. Our take is: use intelligence to build apps, and then you can even have intelligence in those apps, so it can act there. Apps, from what we've seen, stay around for quite a long time. I don't see them going away, but I think everything is going to change in a way. You mentioned being interested in an operating system that's built around an LLM — how do we leverage intelligence in the first place? There is something quite interesting there, where this gets pushed down to the operating system level and becomes a core part, similar to how we think about files and other things — they're just there. It's a tough one. I think we're all trying to figure it out.

Newton: I want to make this concrete for people, particularly for people who haven't built their own app yet. I think your launch line for Glaze was that most software is a compromise. Give us an example or two of that. What's an app on someone's Mac right now that they might be compromising with, and how could they fix that by building their own?

Mann: It starts with something as simple as to-do lists. David Pierce, our friend — he tried out 200 different to-do apps, and I think he mentioned that every to-do app has something good and something bad, and he was flip-flopping around those different apps. So just take the good parts and mix them together in your own app. We've seen those things happen very often. I did this myself — I now have a little to-do app that builds on top of Apple Reminders, and I can use that.

But you can also go much further. Our support team internally built their entire internal tooling on top of it. They use APIs from our services to bring all the data together, and they basically work day to day now in a Glaze app where they get all the support requests. It's connected to our manual, to our internal knowledge. There's an AI built in, so it drafts replies already, and they're improving it as they go. So it starts very simple, but you can scale it up to something for teams. Because quite frankly, when you solve your own problems, there's a high chance that when you work on a team, the person sitting next to you has exactly the same problem. So we see adoption being very nice in teams, where people solve their own and their team's problems, and then share that privately.

Newton: One of the things that I built in Glaze is a Platformer app. It's an archive of everything that I have written, but I've also used an LLM to extract the topics that I write about the most, and the people that I write about the most. Initially, I thought of it as just something that I might want to use for myself. But I have coworkers here, and it can be useful for them to figure out what we have said about something in the past. So now I'm actually thinking about opening it up to them. These are ideas that had never crossed my mind before, because I'm not a technical person and I don't know how to write a line of code. That's something I like about it — it gets me thinking in this direction.

I want to get your thoughts on how big this market for personalized software is. I know we're in very early days. But I'm assuming you think there's potentially a big market, and I want to hear your reason why. In the productivity space, we now know that most people just stick with the default notes app forever. Most people just stick with Apple Reminders forever. Going from that to "well, there's one thing wrong with the Reminders app, I'm going to find an app that lets me tweak it" — that is not something most people are doing today. Do you think that's about to change? Give me your thoughts on where we are in this — why you decided to make this big bet on Glaze as your second product.

Mann: There were a few things. One: if you look at app stores, they're huge. Especially on mobile, we have millions of applications by now. There's obviously a lot of duplication in there, but generally there are lots of apps, and people find whatever they find useful. That's one of those things where we felt like, hey, there's something there — if there are so many apps in an app store, we can service the same. That's why we came very early with the Glaze store, so people can publish apps and other people can take them. We're thinking about also allowing people to take something off the shelf and remix it to make it their own, so it becomes less daunting to start.

I do think the way we currently think about apps is very siloed. Over the next months or years, this will get much more fluid. To give you a little example of an aha moment for me: I run all my internal presentations as one single Glaze app. If I create a new presentation, I basically add a feature to this app. There's no sense of slides that live as a file or something like that — there's just a new slide you can select. It's a weird kind of app, but it changes your perspective of an app, because — oh, I'm adding a new feature to something. Right now we think about an app as a set of features somebody thought about and put together. I think this will get way more fluid. What is an app? What is software generally? I think that's going to change quite a lot.

And I think we're ending up in a world where maybe some of these things get more dynamic. Thinking about your Platformer app — maybe when you have certain things coming up, there's already a new app waiting for you, because it knew certain things were coming up in your calendar. So there's also a way of making it more dynamic, to really tap into what would personally help you.

So I think the market will be dramatically bigger than what we think of as app stores right now. Because if you think about all these creation things — take YouTube and video. That is a massive market now. At the beginning it looked kind of silly and was obviously way smaller, and the ceiling was maybe what you could do with movies. But that didn't account for the fact that suddenly everybody could create, and now we talk about so many millions of people on YouTube. I think we're going to go through a phase of this with software. It's not really clear where we're going to end up, but it's exciting. It's, I think, the most exciting time in software in a long, long time.

Newton: To me, it's easily the most exciting time in software ever, because I can participate in it now. In previous eras, I could write about it, but that was about it. Now I actually get to make my silly apps.

Mann: And I think that's the big change: everybody is a creator now.

Newton: You built Glaze on top of Claude Code and Codex — at least, those are two of the ingredients in it. Those models belong to Anthropic and OpenAI, who I'm guessing would love to own this layer themselves. What are the odds they don't ship a "make me an app" feature at some point? Could we argue that to some extent they already have?

Mann: Maybe they already have. That's the thing — everybody does everything all at once. You also see something g