forMika

We are Lorenzo and Irene, a couple in life as well. For this project, we were inspired by our everyday life. We have a large group of friends, and we often get together for lunches and dinners — every kind of event, actually. We come from Italy, where food, as everyone knows, is almost a religion! So much of our social life, our relationships, and the broader concept of “family,” in the widest possible sense, revolves around food.

We often find ourselves organizing lunches, dinners, aperitifs, picnics, and everything in between… and every single time, the same problems inevitably come up: Someone is celiac, someone is pregnant, someone has allergies, and there are never enough dishes for them; there is either too much food left over or not enough food… In short, real chaos, which can also spoil the atmosphere and the emotions that sharing food and spending time together should instead create.

It was from this need that the idea for forMika was born…

A little helper that supports groups, even large ones, in managing their shared moments, leaving more space for relationships and the pleasure of being together.

The app aims to help both the event organizer and the participants manage the types and quantities of food to bring. How many appetizers, how many pizzas, how many drinks, and so on. A simple way for each person to take responsibility for a small part of the event, while also keeping an eye on the allergies and needs of every participant, so that no one is left out of the celebration.

We built this app using various tools, but mainly Codex and ChatGPT. ChatGPT was the brain, while Codex was the operational arm, with GPT-5.6 Sol orchestrating and using practically all the tools we needed to complete the project. We simply connected the tools to Codex and let it guide us through the technical side. Our contribution was focused on logic and design, the latter being the field Irene is used to working in.

The biggest challenge was coordinating Codex in using all these tools in service of our main idea. It meant translating our ideas about how the app should work — an app that, until very recently, existed only in our imagination — into commands and prompts.

We are proud to have created an app that is still at the beginning of its journey and that we will continue improving until it is fully functional. But it is still an app, and to us, that already feels like a great achievement.

We mainly learned two things. The first is how to create an app, with all the technical and social aspects behind an app made for people. The second is that, even without technical expertise, with the right tools and enough determination, it is possible to do things that, until recently, seemed extremely difficult, if not impossible.

We don’t know what comes after forMika, but we do know what comes after this first version of forMika. We will continue developing this app, make it fully usable, and publish it on both the App Store and the Play Store.

forMika will become a working app that helps people manage their events and enjoy the beauty of simply being together!