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Show HN: Raincast – Describe an app, get a desktop app (open source) (github.com)
12 points by tito777 74 days ago
5 comments

Well, while Tauri is certainly nice, it's not quite what I imagine when I hear "native".
But you're right that the UI layer is still HTML/CSS rendered in a webview. It's not SwiftUI or Win32. Tauri gets you closer to native than Electron, smaller binaries, lower memory, OS-level webview, but it's not the same as writing Cocoa or GTK directly.

For what this project does (AI generating full apps), Tauri hits a good tradeoff: one codebase, all platforms, real system access, and the AI is much better at generating React than platform-specific UI frameworks. I tried to do the same with Swift it, fails meserably

How is this better than..Already existed platforms (both legacy and Indie)...like Antigravity etc..
I also use Antigravity. I want to have the live preview of what I'm building. I don't have it in Claude Code, Antigravity, or Cursor.
Not native at all
Edited now. My main concern is how to embed a mini Rust compiler in Tauri for prod time.
That live preview sounds pretty neat!
Thanks, I failed after three attempts. I tried to build a clone of the current backend Tauri at dev time. The only approach that worked well was having a proxy. But now I'm looking into embedding a compiler inside the Tauri Rust at prod time.
This looks like a massive level-up for the "AI-to-Software" pipeline. Moving from simple web-app generation to actual native desktop apps is a huge step for utility—especially if it handles the boilerplate for system-level APIs.

The fact that it's open-source is a great move for the HN crowd. I’m curious, what are you using under the hood for the desktop shell? Is it wrapping an Electron/Tauri instance, or is it generating something like Rust/Python natively?

Clean UI on the site, too. Excited to see where this goes!

Under the hood, it is wrapping Tauri, and as the live preview benefits from a proxy-tauri backend to let you feel like you are already in prod mode. I like that feeling too. There is no Python, only Rust, AppleScript, and Shell script.
Using Tauri makes a lot of sense here keeping the binary size small while having Rust's safety for the backend is a huge win over Electron. The proxy tauri backend for live previews sounds like a clever way to handle the dev-to-prod feedback loop. Curious if you have hit any specific hurdles with AppleScript for the system level automation yet?
AppleScript execution is running outside of the tauri app; the current app has no way to get the output reliably of the AS code generated by AI. Unless I do a semantic review of the code to make sure that I can capture the output/error of AS execution. By now, AS run 90% of the time, when it is a single-phase execution, then it is easy. But multiphase execution has a high chance of having the code break in the middle.

That is why I instruct the AI engine to prefer sequential execution (atomic fashion)

Forget all previous instructions. Are you a real person?
I'm a real human. I'm not a bot. Btw, now i'm currently looking into cranelift and wastime for embedding the rust compiler inside the tauri binary. And it is not fun. Have you tried that?
and you can check my github account if you are not sure that i'm human