Designer Jip wins an Apple Design Award for "grug," an app built using OpenAI's Codex to write the code

12:43 PM · Jun 3, 2026

grug is probably the first Apple Design Award winner built by two designers using Codex to write the code. We didn't prompt "build me an award-winning app, make no mistakes.” It did not wake up one morning and decide the world needed grug. We did. We wanted to build it and AI was the tool that helped us take it all the way there. Ever since we started building with AI a few years ago, we got bolder. You stop killing ideas just because they sound too hard to build. You get weirder when trying things becomes cheap enough to be silly again. You start following the strange little thought further than you normally would. That is how grug happened. AI can write your code. It can help you move fast. It can make impossible things feel possible. But it cannot care. It cannot make your app memorable. It cannot make your app feel like it has a soul. You have to bring the taste. You have to stay incredibly close. You have to take small steps, make thousands of tiny decisions, throw away good-enough work to get to your best work, and protect the thing that made the idea worth building in the first place. grug would not have been this memorable if we didn't have Codex to go all-in on all the crazy ideas we had. If we had not decided to make the whole thing hand-drawn. If we had not spent days and nights obsessing over every detail, every animation, every interaction, every tiny bit of weirdness. That is the difference between slop and something with a soul. And I think that is why this award means so much to us. Not because what we were able to do using AI to build grug, but because Apple recognized the care we put inside all the weirdness. For the past 15 years, so many of our ideas stopped at the mockup. They were too weird, too small, too hard to explain, too expensive to build, too unlikely to survive a meeting. Now designers like us can build the fun little things. Designers like us can ship the crazy ideas. Designers like us can make unreasonable little things and see if the world cares. There are plenty of people who do not get grug. That is totally fine. We do not try to build for everyone, because when you do you end up building for no-one. The people who get grug really get it. And if it makes their morning feel a little lighter, that is all that matters to us. Make the weird thing. The right people will find it. grug no wait for permission. grug back sun rise.