Submitted by twovests in just_post (edited )

iPhones have a very powerful embedded scripting language called Shortcuts that can be used for trivial automations (like "turn off wifi when I get in the car", or "this button turns on color filters, dark mode, and high contrast") to extended functionality ("download contents from URL from clipboard to files") to complicated programs.

The editor is your iPhone and every "line" is onerous. It's very difficult to edit these and to make complicated shortcuts. To make matters worse, the Shortcuts editor on the iPhone is very buggy. It's like a node-based scripting language, but is strictly linear, and oftentimes break. Searching for nodes is also buggy. You wanted to toggle Dark Mode? "Well, now all the nodes here will toggle Dark Mode on an Apple TV you connected to at a friends place two years ago, to fix it you will need to start over."

Shortcuts are being meaningfully improved in iOS 27, through the introduction of two features:

  • "If - else" support. (This did not exist before!)

  • Vibe coding, i.e. generate a shortcut from natural language.

This is a very frustrating, shitty bandaid on top of something that would be so powerful if it were not so artificially hobbled.


I think "Use LLMs to interact with a broken UX flow" is an active trend. Here are some real LLM use cases that only exist because people created problems on purpose:

  • To cancel subscriptions with onerous cancel flows,

  • To get a list of locations and venues in an area,

  • To opt-out of arbitration clauses,

  • To generate Shortcuts on iPhones,

It makes me sad

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