Andreas Pitzer

We're in the Geocities era of building with AI: chaotic, ugly, and half-baked slop. But look where the web is today, 30 years later. I'm not writing off AI just yet.

"…are the ones who do". Well done, OpenAI’s agency.

A study found 30 minutes of snoozing: • actually improved cognitive performance compared to abrupt waking • cost only 6 minutes of sleep, and • prevented waking from deep sleep.

Reviewing Claude Code output:

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.

Apple Design Award winners haven been announced! Congrats @jipvandervelde and @michelelings for their beautiful @grug_speak - so well deserved!

You can ship any idea by Friday now. Which makes the idea worth nothing. So the only question left is: did anyone need it – or did you just have fun building it?

@jipvandervelde @michelelings Congratulations!🎈

Unbelievable!!! grug started as a funny joke over the weekend but quickly grew to become one of the most fun things @michelelings and I built this past year. To win an Apple Design Award is truly a dream come true since we started working together 15 years ago. Speechless...

❌ The quality of your idea is the least predictive thing about whether it works. ✅ A mediocre fix for a desperate problem beats a brilliant fix for a mild one, every time. 🎯 You're not being graded on the idea. You're being graded on how much someone already hurts.

Interruption research shows: + natural breakpoints mean shorter lags + longer interruptions hurt more, and + relevant interruptions cost less than irrelevant ones. The key finding for snooze: negotiate timing improves both decision performance AND perceived control while reducing distraction.

Not every missed meeting is a personal failure. Some days the deep work just swallows you whole. It wasn't poor discipline and it wasn't laziness. You were building something real. And that's worth acknowledging. Keep going.

@novikoff @Adobe @MacPaw @cleanmymac That was benchmark-quality work, absolutely well done.

Back In 2012, we designed CleanMyMac 2 in Adobe Illustrator. All interfaces, icons, and textures are made in fully scalable vector graphics. Big icons are not 3D and are also made in Ai with Blends. The interface was revolutionary at that time.

@Habichtsberg @seraleev There are adapters you can buy. Tried them, but I find MagSafe to be a lot more convenient.

@seraleev That would be cool - but EU regulations might get in the way of that. Wonder how that still could be done

This was my favorite charging feature on the MacBook. Apple, please bring this experience to the iPhone

@seraleev The EU outlawed such innovation - it mandates USB-C. Luckily, our overlords have permitted MagSafe + Qi2 ;)

@Dagnysback Ja, sie sind eh da. Klarer Fall für "noch mehr Feminismus!" - sind ja alles "MäNnEr" 🤡

Hallo, Wiener Rathaus!? Ist da jemand?

@foundmickey_ @marclou @ianncushing Cyprus I guess. Unless you're legible for the IP box, which is 2.5%.

@marclou @ianncushing In wich country is your company based to get 17% corp and 0% div tax?

I’ve never understood the concept of saying you “made” an amount of money, but it’s actually just revenue

@marclou @ianncushing No IP box?

@ianncushing Everything is 85% profit (apart ship or die at 48%) Then I pay 17% corp tax And pay myself dividends (0% tax)

BIGGEST MYTHS IN DEV LIFE: 1: "Just ship it, you can clean it up later." 2: "Notifications help you stay on top of things." 3: "More meetings means more alignment." 4: "Deep work happens between 9 and 5." 5: "You'll focus better once the setup is perfect."

@schwurbler6500 Der Besitz eines Messers sollte keine Bedingung sein. Aber es ist ein guter Anfang.

Jeder Asylant aus Syrien oder Afghanistan, der hier mit einem Messer aufgegriffen wird, gehört sofort eingesperrt bis zu seiner Abschiebung. Was für ein Menschenrecht soll das sein, in sichere Länder zu „flüchten“ und hier bewaffnet herumzurennen?

Claude resolves merge conflicts automatically in a matter of minutes, which I wouldn’t even dare to attempt to resolve manually.

Not sure if I'm paranoid - I just feel more confident modifying code when tests are in place, even if AI does all the coding :) Plus in this case, custom lint rules to ensure various user contracts ("we never modify your calendar") on code level, haha! AI has made quality so much more effortless.