AI-Generated Shortcuts
Apple today announced that users can now describe a shortcut in natural language, with Apple Intelligence automatically building the automation in the background.
Users can simply describe what they want, such as “when I’m leaving work, text my wife with my expected ETA,” and Shortcuts will actually build the shortcut to make it work.
This sounds great in that I find creating shortcuts annoying. It’s not always clear which building blocks I should be using, and stringing them together properly seems tedious and fiddly. On the other hand, I dislike how AppleScript doesn’t get first-class support for the functionality and triggers that are available to Shortcuts.
Data Jar got sherlocked, and that genuinely makes me happy.
Apple should let users filter out and maybe even rewrite notifications from any app using Shortcuts.
[…]
The new notification automation trigger in Shortcuts is super cool. As far as I can tell, it won’t let me modify the notification content or filter out notifications based on the content, but it’s still a quite powerful addition.
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Third-party automation triggers in Shortcuts are now possible. Sort of.
Just send a notification containing data meant for the new notification trigger to consume.
iOS 27 allows 3rd party shortcuts actions to run for longer than 30 seconds making me publish 2 actions that have been hidden behind feature flags for years.
Create cloud servers, run commands and destroy them again right from Shortcuts.
Previously:
Update (2026-06-26): Jason Snell:
This is as close as we’ve come, across 40 years, to the original dream of putting computer power in the hands of everyone. You can literally tell your device what you want it to do, and when—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it.
[…]
Yes, there are lots of limitations. Describe a Shortcut doesn’t work with third-party apps, only Apple’s own stuff (at least, for now). It can sometimes get confused, especially with complex queries. And it has an interesting tendency to kick things to the Use Model action—why am I not surprised that an AI model likes to build Shortcuts that themselves use AI models?
But when it works, which is most of the time, it’s magical.
Shortcuts on macOS Golden Gate is… Something.
Dedicating that much window space to a larger shortcut tile and a text field feels incredibly wasteful.
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I've had terrible luck with shortcuts. It just so often doesn't seem to work in a way that makes sense. It's not easy to use, unfortunately, for even slightly detailed things. I wonder if this will help that issue
If they're anyway AI-generating them, why in the world not just AI-generate AppleScript, ffs! That might actually work!
