Why Skena exists
When a television is off, it becomes a giant blank rectangle—an object interior designers have spent decades attempting to negotiate with. When it is on, it usually asks for attention.
Skena offers another possibility: something beautiful, alive, and effortless. Open the app, choose a visual expression, tune it if you want, then let the interface disappear. The product is native to tvOS, and it currently features seven visual styles rendered in real time with Metal rather than playing fixed videos.
What existed before Build Week
Skena and its core tvOS and Metal foundation started being developed two weeks before the event. This submission is a meaningful extension of that foundation after the July 13, 2026 start.
The repository documents the pre-event baseline, the audited event range, the exact submitted branch, and the evidence used for attribution. Work outside the directly evidenced Codex sessions remains product context and is not claimed as Codex work.
What changed during Build Week
Codex task history, tool actions, diffs, builds, and commits directly evidence 40 mainline commits during the event. The work includes:
- unifying the Skena project and repairing naming, asset, and resource wiring;
- adding multi-color palette support and the three-color Radiant palette;
- iterating on shader banding, dithering, color depth, and perceptual blending, including restoring known-good checkpoints when experiments did not improve the result;
- optimizing River, Clouds, Nebula, Fireflies, Swirl, and Energy while preserving their visual character;
- restoring Expression-menu focus and stabilizing animated value rows;
- improving cold launch and Create-menu loading performance;
- making Bright and Dark behavior palette-aware and tuning contrast, saturation, and shadow depth;
- lowering the supported floor to tvOS 17; and
- hardening release behavior, the privacy manifest, and Top Shelf media preparation.
How Codex and GPT-5.6 were used
My role is creative direction and product judgment. I describe how motion should feel, where focus should move, what looks too harsh, slow, digital, flat, or not alive enough. GPT-5.6 Sol in Codex turns those decisions into Swift, Metal, project settings, builds, checkpoints, comparisons, and reversions.
The collaboration follows a repeatable loop: I describe a visual or interaction problem in product language; Codex locates and explains the relevant code path; it applies one focused implementation; the app is built and evaluated; and I decide whether to keep, refine, or restore it.
This was especially valuable in shader work. I could judge banding, color depth, softness, speed, and atmosphere without pretending to understand every formula. Codex translated those judgments into rendering formats, interpolation, dithering strategies, and mathematical changes, while recoverable Git checkpoints made experimentation safe.
Codex also made software development itself legible. Branches, diffs, build errors, project settings, performance investigation, and integration stopped being opaque obstacles. The evidence is based on Codex task history and tool actions rather than the Git author name configured on my computer.
The important story is not that AI independently built an app. It is that agentic coding removed the implementation barrier between creative direction and working software while leaving vision, taste, decisions, and final judgment with the human.
What I am proud of
Skena is a coherent native television product: a SwiftUI interface, real-time Metal renderer, persistent visual state, seven expressions, fifteen palettes, tuned interaction, a launch experience, and an embedded Top Shelf extension.
The same workflow has also let me begin building Savva, the creative company around Skena, including its library, production planner, website, animation systems, and internal creative tools. Those are supporting context rather than separate hackathon entries. Skena remains the submission.
What comes next
Next are TestFlight, broader real-television testing, accessibility and interaction refinement, and the first public release. After that, Skena's visual language can continue to expand while Savva's tools connect creative direction, production, and software in one practice.
Three weeks ago, I was a creative director in my head and in my heart. Now the things I imagine are beginning to exist in the world.
Hello, world.
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