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Giving people tools to create their own tools fundamentally changes the equation of what software can be.

Thomas reflects on the Raycast extension ecosystem and how it inspired Glaze: once you give people the ability to build their own tools, even without AI, they create things no company would have built. ✦ AI generated

Thomas Paul Mann · Platformer · 2026-07-22 · original ↗

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“What did building it [Raycast] teach you about what people want from their tools, and did it lead you directly to building Glaze?”

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?

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▦ Raycast ✳ Glaze ◉ Thomas Paul Mann

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Within three years, 30 to 50 percent of the software on your Mac could be software you made yourself.Thomas Paul Mann · Platformer · conf 80%

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provides context → Most commercial software is a compromise: companies add features to chase growth, bloating apps until they hurt more than they help.Thomas Paul Mann · Platformer rebuts → AI coding tools have not made developers dramatically more productive; a study found only a tiny uptick in the actual amount of high-quality software being shipped.Jeremy Howard · Machine Learning Street Talk supports → AI is just a tool like other tools developers use, and it is clearly useful.Linus Torvalds · Simon Willison's Weblog