Announcement: Glide Partners with AI design platform Wender

Glide has been a design-forward software company since its founding. Discovering Wender, the alignment was obvious from the beginning. We are proud to announce that Glide is becoming Wender's biggest customer, and we have officially brought its founder, Josh Johnson, onto the Glide team as Senior Product Manager, to help us build the new Glide for the AI age.

Wender is an AI design platform that creates gorgeous designs that don't look like AI, using natural language prompts. Beginners and professionals alike can use it to rapidly design websites, presentations, app UI, graphics, social media posts, and more. Designs are in HTML and CSS and fully customizable with Tailwind.

An interview with Wender founder Josh Johnson

We sat down with Josh this week to ask him about starting Wender, joining forces with Glide, and his outlook on the future of AI and design. Here’s what he had to say.

Q: What inspired you to create Wender?

I absolutely love using AI to code, but I really hated that “AI slop” look I was getting straight out of models when I asked them to help me build something. I also found that a chat experience just isn’t the best for branching off and exploring your creative ideas. I built Wender to scratch my own itch and explore what an AI native design tool might look like.

There are a dozen tools in this space now, but in early 2025, there really wasn’t anything I could point to that felt like it let humans use AI to design faster while still staying in the driver’s seat and retaining tons of control over the output. That’s been my north star with Wender. I don’t want to replace anyone’s role or what they love doing with AI. That’s just not what I’m interested in. I am happiest when I’m using new technology to give people superpowers, and I hope that everyone using Wender feels like it empowers them to be more creative, not less.

Q: Why join Glide?

I’ve gotten to know a few of the folks at Glide in the last year, and I found myself naturally staying in touch with them through DMs and email. I love that they’re all huge nerds like me! We would try each other’s products and record video feedback, and request features. When the opportunity came up to join the team, it felt very natural. David’s pitch for where Glide is going and how I could play a role in building that future was too exciting to pass up.

We are working on some truly exciting stuff, and I really feel like I’m a part of something special already. Even the way the team works is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Product managers, designers, even the dang CEO are all constantly shipping PRs. Everyone is leveraging AI to code experiments, fix bugs, unblock customers, and improve the product at a speed that I’ve never seen. I have felt very deeply for the past year that how product teams work is going to change dramatically, and at Glide, I feel like I’ve stepped into that future.

Q: What is the Glide/Wender partnership going to look like?

When I initially talked with David about joining Glide, I was hesitant because I thought that doing so would likely mean the end of Wender, and I’d worked way too hard on it for that to happen. I really like Wender. I was surprised at how enthusiastic David was that he not only wanted me to hold onto it, but also that he wanted to go above and beyond to make sure that I could continue to build it.

Wender is a design tool built to explore this moment where the entire landscape for how product design is done is completely changing. The Wender partnership with Glide ensures that the team here has access to the tool, and I’ll get to see how it does and doesn’t fit into a real product team’s process. I’ve already had some fun sessions with the design team, showing them how fast it is to iterate on their ideas in Wender vs. a more traditional screen design tool like Figma.

Q: What’s next for Wender?

I’ve recently realized that Wender’s AI capabilities need to go far beyond the little AI chat box that lives in the product. Everyone is working with their own agent setup on their own machine, and I want to complement that, not compete with it. Whether you’re in Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or anything else, I want Wender to be your canvas for design exploration.

I’ve been working hard to make that easy so that you can just tell your agent to MCP into Wender and build out some designs based on your actual local repo components and screens. I think the ideal workflow is that as you’re building, when you inevitably hit that modal or sign-up flow that you think looks like slop, you tell your agent to go make a bunch of variations in Wender, and you collaborate with it there until you get something you like. The first pieces of this journey are now in the product, and I’m working on improving this as much as possible.