Dax Wins Gold at the 2026 Davey Awards
I am thrilled to share that Dax has won Gold at the 2026 Davey Awards, in the AI Applications & Platforms category for Best AI-Powered Code or Development Tool.
Dax is something my brother Dominic and I have built together, and seeing it recognised alongside some of the best digital work of the year is a genuinely special moment. I am grateful, a little surprised, and very proud of what we have made.
The Dax entry in the Davey Awards 2026 winners gallery. Image: daveyawards.com.
About the Davey Awards
The Davey Awards are run by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts, and celebrate creative work across websites, mobile, video, social, design and, increasingly, AI. The awards focus on work that shows real craft and creativity, whatever the size of the team behind it. Entries are recognised at Silver and Gold level, with Best in Show reserved for the very top work.
How Dax Started
Dax began as my brother Dominic's idea. He saw how new developers were learning to build with AI, and he vibe coded the first version of Dax himself, getting a working product out into the world fast.
When I started using it, I could see what it could become, but I could also see the problems. The design was inconsistent, the tools did not feel like they belonged together, and there was usability friction everywhere: things that were hard to find, interfaces that asked too much of you, and flows that broke your concentration instead of protecting it.
So I picked it up and took my time redesigning the platform from the ground up, turning a collection of useful features into one coherent product. The Dax you see today is the result of that redesign, built together with Dominic, and we are still actively working on it.
A Turning Point in My Work
Dax is also an important chapter in my own journey as a designer. Most of my career has been about joining a product and shaping it with a team. With Dax, nobody handed me a brief. I saw a product I believed in, found the problems myself, and took responsibility for fixing them.
That meant thinking like an owner as much as a designer: deciding what Dax should be, what to cut, what to put at the centre, and how every tool should behave, then working through it with Dominic until the product matched the vision. It is the clearest example yet of the kind of designer I want to be, one who does not just make screens for a product but helps decide what the product is.
It also builds on everything that came before it. Designing oversight for AI agents on HITL, computer use on Picua and security testing on Golem taught me how to make complex, technical tools feel calm and usable. Dax is where all of that came together in a product I helped shape from the inside.
What Dax Is
Dax is a macOS platform built around one idea: the next generation of developers does not code alone, and their tools should not assume they do.
At its centre is Dax Shepherd, a multiplayer terminal. Several people connect to the same session, see the same output and build together in real time. Not screen sharing and not async collaboration, but a shared terminal for the vibe coding era.
Around Shepherd sits a suite of accelerators that remove the small frictions developers hit all day: Ask AI, Generate Image, File Drop, Image Ask, Image to Prompt, Prompt Snippets, Vibe History, Secrets and more. Each one opens from the keyboard, does its job, and gets out of the way.
Dax Shepherd: one terminal, several people, building together.
The Design Challenge
Dominic had already proven that the tools were useful. The hard part of the redesign was making a dozen of them feel like one product.
Every accelerator had to share the same interaction model, the same visual language and the same sense of how much interface it deserved. A tool that resolves in seconds should not look like a tool that takes minutes. So the system is keyboard-first, compact enough not to interrupt the session, and predictable from one tool to the next, so that someone new to development can find what they need without being taught.
Shepherd brought its own questions. Who is in the session? What is each person doing? Whose input is about to run? The interface has to answer all of that without adding ceremony, so the session feels collaborative rather than crowded.
Generate Image, one of the Dax accelerators: invoke it, get the result, return to the session.
The design mission was simple to say and hard to do: enable the next generation of developers.
Why This One Means a Lot
It is great to see that all the hard work Dominic and I have put in has paid off, and that it is being recognised by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts.
The part of Dax I am proudest of is not a single feature. It is the moment when a first-time developer opens Dax, joins a Shepherd session with someone more experienced, and starts building alongside them, watching, contributing and learning in context. That used to require being in the same room. Seeing the judges recognise work built around that idea means a great deal.
It also caps a year that has shaped my career. HITL won a Webby Award for Best Responsible AI Implementation, the DDamoah Studios site won a W3 Silver Award, and now Dax has a Davey Gold. Three very different products, all built on the belief that complex technology should feel effortless.
Thank You
First, to Dominic: thank you for the idea, for building the first version, and for trusting me to tear the design apart and rebuild it. This one is ours.
And thank you to everyone else credited on the award:
- Elroy Des Bordes, Software Engineer, 300 Million Legacy
- Kwaw-Fletcher Frimpong, AI Security & Governance Consultant
- Lisa Mendita, Human in the Loop
- Gifty Amankwah, Dax
And thank you to the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts and the Davey Awards judges for the recognition. Dax is live and still evolving, and this is only the start.
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