Comment by prodigycorp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prodigycorp | Hacker News Reader

Someone please exfiltrate their prompts/skills so i can use these on Codex. I've have relative success building my own apps for mac using Codex but they're uglier than sin and dont seem to understand well how permissions work.

Having antigravity is useful because Gemini 3.1 is pretty good at generating UI sugar. Claude 4.6 Opus provides nothing to write home about. Their shadcn looksmaxxing hasn't generalized to writing good desktop UIs.

Raycast's only edge here seems to be the fact that they are obviously very good at Mac app development and probably have impeccable skills/documentation for building them.

Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play. If I'm Apple, the reason to buy a product/team like this is a no-brainer.

Raycast are not building Mac apps the apple way though. They are using react native and I am willing to bet that this does too.

I always thought it was native. You can write extensions using React, yes, but I was under the impression those got compiled to their internal Swift-based UI components

Raycast could be both native and written with React Native:

React Native itself renders JSX as native components (not a web view that renders HTML/CSS).

People conflate React with HTML because that is the most common renderer, but React can be rendered into anything.

>Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play.

Raycast recently made a Windows version. So perhaps they aren't as Apple-centric.

> Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play.

No kidding, although I think Apple would only be interested if it uses SwiftUI. (The marketing page doesn't say. Raycast itself uses React + Node for extensions, but its React components render to native widgets.)

A similar product in the mobile space is Rork - I haven't used it but I've seen it on twitter a bit. I definitely wouldn't be surprised to see Apple acquire one of them.

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