Apple AppDev Workflow

Apple AppDev Workflow is a Codex Marketplace plugin for building, reviewing, debugging, and releasing iOS and macOS apps. Its primary interface is broad, natural language—not manual skill selection. Its defining behavior is deterministic, pre-sampling top-level routing: a trusted UserPromptSubmit hook infers the intent of an Apple-development request and injects the owning workflow before the model responds.

Version 0.2.0 runs that routing path on stock Codex without the retired fork-only routerSelection carry. Fully qualified skill invocation remains the explicit fallback when hooks are disabled, declined, changed, or restricted.

OpenAI Build Week 2026

Why I built it

I already really enjoyed the general Codex experience. The frustration was specific to Apple development: workflows would drift, ambiguity was resolved poorly, and context was easy to lose across a large codebase or several repos and worktrees. Even when the individual answers were useful, the overall effort could feel disjointed and unfocused.

I had experimented with orchestration frameworks such as crewAI the previous year, but the models were not yet capable enough to deliver the full promise. I also knew a very different orchestration system firsthand. I have worked in commercial kitchens, trained formally in culinary arts, and owned and operated a successful establishment. Escoffier's brigade de cuisine gave me the idea: clear ownership, specialized stations, disciplined handoffs, and escalation might also be an effective way to coordinate a multi-skill workflow in Codex.

Apple AppDev Workflow is my attempt to adapt that insight into a deterministic orchestration harness for end-to-end Apple-platform development. It is not the complete expression of the idea, but it is a promising first result.

Natural language is the control surface

The user does not have to understand the routing graph or decide which skill owns a broad request. A prompt such as:

Review this iOS app and tell me if it is ready for release.

is enough. Before model output begins, the trusted deterministic hook recognizes the broad Apple intent and assigns the top-level owner. That owner grounds the turn in the real project, resolves the release-readiness intent, and coordinates the release workflow and its required review, testing, manual-validation, and release-operations stations. Explicit skill invocation exists as a reliable fallback; it is not the normal user experience.

What changed during Build Week

The project existed before the Build Week submission period. Most of its experimental development used GPT-5.5. The work submitted for Build Week is the release-defining extension completed after July 13, 2026:

• a trusted, fail-closed UserPromptSubmit router for natural Apple prompts and plugin or skill invocations
• explicit routing policy, top-level owner injection, negative cases, resume behavior, and post-compaction behavior
• removal of the fork-only router-selection dependency from the product path
• a 12-case signed stock Codex Desktop routing matrix
• a separate 9-case live Xcode CodingAssistant compatibility matrix
• public-release gates, a clean Git Marketplace distribution, and the published v0.2.0 release

The private qualification source records 25 post-cutoff commits (21 non-merge commits). Relative to its pre-window baseline, that train changed 79 files with 10,499 insertions and 1,004 deletions. The public artifact maps back to exact private source commit c30409e917a5bcdb02010c0b78b4971c2b3fa42a and public release commit c3702d917fedaa6674a750695d3173e36d714522 in the release provenance.

How Codex, GPT-5.5, and GPT-5.6 were used

Most of the exploratory product development happened in Codex with GPT-5.5. Later in Build Week, I used the experimental plugin itself with GPT-5.6 for the more expensive release task: replace the custom-runtime routing dependency, coordinate work across the private source and clean public release, qualify the result in stock Codex, and publish v0.2.0. I would not have attempted that release train with GPT-5.5; GPT-5.6 handled the long context, ambiguity, and cross-repository coordination with relative ease.

The primary GPT-5.6 Codex thread preserved the path from product decisions through repository archaeology, implementation, hostile-input testing, stock-host validation, carry-removal analysis, release gates, documentation, and public packaging. The human-owned decisions remained explicit: deterministic pre-sampling ownership was non-negotiable; hooks had to fail closed when trust was unavailable; explicit skill invocation had to remain a safe fallback; and Desktop, Xcode, private-harness, and public-distribution evidence could not be blended into one claim.

Primary Codex session ID: 019f6e9b-331e-7e62-b7fc-85340818ae86.

Qualification recorded 17 hook-router tests and 110 plugin-contract tests. The 12-case Desktop run used an earlier package whose four routing payloads are byte-for-byte identical to v0.2.0; a fresh public v0.2.0 install separately proved Marketplace registration, app-server read and install, runtime provisioning, and plugin-owned MCP attribution. The Xcode 9/9 result is host-compatibility evidence and is not presented as Marketplace-distribution evidence.

Install

Add this Git marketplace with a plugin-capable Codex CLI:

codex plugin marketplace add jkaunert/apple-appdev-workflow --ref main

Then open Codex Settings, choose Plugins, find Apple AppDev Workflow by Joshua Kaunert, and install Apple AppDev Workflow. Review and trust the routing hook, and approve the plugin-declared MCP servers when Codex asks.

Start a fresh chat after installation. A broad natural request such as Review this iOS app and tell me if it is ready for release should infer intent and route automatically. The explicit fallback is:

$apple-appdev-workflow:apple-app-orchestrator Review this iOS app and tell me if it is ready for release.

The bundle declares sosumi, memory, and XcodeBuildMCP in its plugin-owned MCP configuration. Node.js and npm are needed when those npm-backed MCP tools are materialized.

What Ships Here

• the exact qualified 0.2.0 Marketplace profile under plugins/apple-appdev-workflow/
• deterministic natural-prompt and textual-chip routing through the plugin hook
• explicit fully qualified skill invocation as a security-boundary fallback
• Apple workflow skills, references, assets, and plugin-owned MCP declarations

The Xcode CodingAssistant companion is compatible with the same routing payload but uses a separate signed provisioning envelope. It is intentionally not included in this Marketplace repository or the 0.2.0 Marketplace artifact.

Trust Boundary

Automatic routing depends on Codex accepting the installed plugin's hook. If the hook is untrusted, disabled, modified, or blocked by policy, automatic injection must fail closed; use an explicit $apple-appdev-workflow:<skill> invocation instead.

See release provenance, the privacy policy, and the terms of service.

Support and License

Use GitHub Issues for public support. The plugin is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.