{"id":47941,"date":"2025-06-03T14:36:38","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T18:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=47941"},"modified":"2025-06-04T16:10:31","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T20:10:31","slug":"sky-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/03\/sky-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"Sky Preview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/skybysoftware\/status\/1927760056122036511\">Sky<\/a> (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.macrumors.com\/2025\/05\/28\/sky-ai-mac-app\/\">MacRumors<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/x.com\/skybysoftware\/status\/1927760056122036511\">\n<p>Introducing Sky for Mac.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Sky floats over whatever you&rsquo;re doing so you can:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ask questions from anywhere on your Mac<\/li>\n<li>Take action in your apps (send a message, schedule an event, etc)<\/li>\n<li>Use your own custom tools by adding prompts, scripts, shortcuts, or MCPs<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.macstories.net\/stories\/sky-for-mac-preview\/\">Federico Viticci<\/a> (<a href=\"https:\/\/mastodon.macstories.net\/@viticci\/114586346228814327\">Mastodon<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.macstories.net\/stories\/sky-for-mac-preview\/\"><p>For the past two weeks, I&rsquo;ve been able to use <a href=\"https:\/\/sky.app\">Sky<\/a>, the new app from the people behind Shortcuts who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.macstories.net\/linked\/workflow-co-founders-want-to-bring-ai-to-the-desktop\/\">left Apple two years ago<\/a>. As soon as I saw a demo, I felt the same way I did about Editorial, Workflow, and Shortcuts: I knew Sky was going to fundamentally change how I think about my macOS workflow and the role of automation in my everyday tasks.<\/p><p>Only this time, because of AI and LLMs, Sky is more intuitive than all those apps and requires a different approach, as I will explain in this exclusive preview story ahead of a full review of the app later this year.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>Sky is an AI-powered assistant that can perform actions and answer questions for <em>any<\/em> window and <em>any<\/em> app open on your Mac. On the surface, it may look like any other launcher or LLM with a desktop app: you press a hotkey, and a tiny floating UI comes up.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>What sets Sky apart from anything I&rsquo;ve tried or seen on macOS to date is that it uses LLMs to understand which windows are open on your Mac, what&rsquo;s <em>inside<\/em> them, and what actions you can perform based on those apps&rsquo; contents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/mastodon.social\/@matthewcassinelli\/114586634490028260\">Matthew Cassinelli<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/mastodon.social\/@matthewcassinelli\/114586634490028260\">\n<p>Pressing &#x2318;&#x2318; to grab your current context is a delightfully natural interaction.<\/p>\n<p>Sky saves the current window or file as well as its metadata, so you can ask AI about it right away.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>To go further, you can add Custom Tools &#x2013; which can include custom instructions, MCPs, AppleScripts, &amp; shell scripts &#x2013; and yes, Shortcuts!<\/p><p>You can extend Sky&rsquo;s capabilities however you want &#x2013; and designing them is easy with prompting built right into the editor interface.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/pxlnv.com\/linklog\/sky-mac\/\">Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/pxlnv.com\/linklog\/sky-mac\/\">\n<p>This feels like the so-far-unfulfilled promise of Apple Intelligence &mdash; but <em>more<\/em>. The ways I want to automate iOS are limited. But the kinds of things I want help with on my Mac are boundless.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>As <a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/30\/grammarly-raises-1-billion\/\">with Grammarly<\/a>, it&rsquo;s amazing that they seem to be doing more than what Apple promised, yet without requiring the apps to rearchitect everything around intents.<\/p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/mastodon.social\/@stroughtonsmith\/114586500175100480\">Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/mastodon.social\/@stroughtonsmith\/114586500175100480\">\n<p>The Apple Intelligence team meeting after seeing Sky, after very publicly failing to ship their own version of this stuff.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/mastodon.social\/@stroughtonsmith\/114586526700367036\">Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/mastodon.social\/@stroughtonsmith\/114586526700367036\">\n<p>The real question is why couldn&rsquo;t the founders of Shortcuts build this stuff at Apple, and what were the systemic failures that pushed them out to go it alone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/mastodon.macstories.net\/@johnvoorhees\/114613380855129481\">John Voorhees<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/mastodon.macstories.net\/@johnvoorhees\/114613380855129481\">\n<p>This week on @appstories, I share my first impressions of Sky and we share our wishes for Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/03\/the-automation-gap\/\">The Automation Gap<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/03\/model-context-protocol-mcp-tools-for-mac\/\">Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tools for Mac<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/30\/grammarly-raises-1-billion\/\">Grammarly Raises $1 Billion<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/12\/apple-delays-more-personalized-siri-apple-intelligence-features\/\">Apple Delays &ldquo;More Personalized Siri&rdquo; Apple Intelligence Features<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/03\/privacy-of-windows-copilot-recall\/\">Privacy of Windows Copilot+ Recall<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p id=\"sky-preview-update-2025-06-04\">Update (<a href=\"#sky-preview-update-2025-06-04\">2025-06-04<\/a>): <a href=\"https:\/\/taoofmac.com\/space\/blog\/2025\/06\/03\/2155\">Rui Carmo<\/a> (<a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=44179691\">Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/taoofmac.com\/space\/blog\/2025\/06\/03\/2155\"><p>I mean, people have free will and all, and can choose to work wherever they want, but this makes my <a href=\"https:\/\/taoofmac.com\/space\/blog\/2025\/03\/14\/1830\">earlier rant about their having neglected automation<\/a> feel like the first clue to a corporate culture murder scene.<\/p><p>Not having made it possible for them to thrive feels like vanilla corporate politics, but having brilliant people <em>leave<\/em> Apple and ship something that is, even in preview, <em>much better than anything that Apple Intelligence promised<\/em> (including the made up bits they paraded as marketing material) is just gross mismanagement (now you know why I held back on this draft).<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>I can see Apple balking at doing something like Sky (if they ever even considered it) because it not only has to share bits of your screen with an LLM, but also because it would have to open up the Mac to third-party automation in a way that it has never done before, and that would be a huge departure from their current approach.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>But the privacy angle is interesting, because Apple was in a perfect position to do something exactly like Sky and ensure that it was done in a way that respected user privacy. Even though local models are still not quite there yet (remember that RAM requirements are still very high as far as running truly useful models are concerned), they do have the confidential computing tech to run inference in a privacy-preserving way&#x2013;which might be the only bit of Apple Intelligence that actually works at this point.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sky (MacRumors): Introducing Sky for Mac. [&#8230;] Sky floats over whatever you&rsquo;re doing so you can: Ask questions from anywhere on your Mac Take action in your apps (send a message, schedule an event, etc) Use your own custom tools by adding prompts, scripts, shortcuts, or MCPs Federico Viticci (Mastodon): For the past two weeks, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-06-03T18:36:40Z","apple_news_api_id":"fec01fa3-74e9-4254-83fa-6c2151f65058","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-06-04T20:10:34Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQ==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/A_sAfo3TpQlSD-mwhUfZQWA","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2684,2602,159,1351,2317,2682,30,32,2598,2776,355,1686,2779],"class_list":["post-47941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-app-intents","tag-apple-intelligence","tag-applescript","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-claude","tag-mac","tag-macapp","tag-macos-15-sequoia","tag-model-context-protocol-mcp","tag-privacy","tag-shortcuts","tag-sky"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47941"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47959,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47941\/revisions\/47959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}