When you say Claude learned it. That's in the current context window it is able to do that, right? Or is there a more permanent way to make it learn something?

Cool to hear Claude was able to learn it. I was planning on leveraging it in a future version of this project I was hacking on that lets you execute shortcut actions as tools (without creating actual shortcuts): https://tarq.net/posts/action-relay-shortcut-actions-mcp/

Well, that’s a domain that has caught my attention so I’ll give this more weight (ltg). I recall novel Mac apps that weren’t quite right for me but seemed thoughtful.

Yeah having this opens up the LLM assisting path to build shortcuts. Which is great! Maintaining them by hand is not

AppleScript was just a little weird but I could get my head around it. Shortcuts just doesn’t make sense. Even the simplest things are hard to do and the scripts are totally unmaintainable. I don’t know why Apple is doing this.

It feels actively hostile to programmers sometimes

I felt really smart after I made a fancy Shortcut that did complex playlist generation based on rules and whatnots.

Of course, adding music to a playlist broke a couple of updates down the line and, as far as I'm aware, still doesn't work properly several years later.

(I moved to Marvis Pro[0] because it has reasonably complex smart playlists that just about mimic what I was doing with my generator except they're transient and not saved as mine were. Win some, lose some.)

[0] No link, sorry, because it'd either be iOS App Store or ad-laden bloat sites "reviewing" it. https://www.reddit.com/r/MarvisApp/ might be worth a read though.

This has everything. https://routinehub.co/

A lot of examples from Federico Viticci / MacStories (scroll down past the Automation Academy ad)

https://www.macstories.net/shortcuts/

/r/Shortcuts is your best bet.

Probably Reddit.

> Why would you spell it like that if you don't want me to pronounce it chéri/sherry?

Because that's a way to spell it without changing the pronounciation in the US. Also, in the extremely unlikely event that it becomes very popular, in the US you can't trademark a dictionary word, it must be something unique.

There are some things that are only available in Shortcuts because Apple gave the app entitlements to communicate with parts of the system that an AppleScript or other apps can't. Things like setting/getting the Focus Mode, changing some system settings like Airdrop Receiving, Color Filters, Background Sounds etc.

Also some apps export Shortcut actions that can run in-app code: for example my Lunar app has an action that can help fixing arrangement when monitors flip around [1]

It's much easier to implement a struct for a Shortcut, than exporting AppleScript sdef files or creating IPC command-line tools, so a lot of apps take this route for code that needs access to the memory of the running app.

[1] https://lunar.fyi/shortcuts#fix-monitor-arrangement

Apple designed Shortcuts to look like a shiny toy demo, and it gets awkward fast once you leave the happy path. AppleScript is old, weird, and still wired into a lot of Mac apps, but the moment it trips over something basic like text encoding you can lose an hour digging through forum posts from 2004.

With Hammerspoon, you get Lua and direct macOS APIs, so you can push much further if you don't mind writing more glue code. If you care about serious Mac automation, you'll probably mix them and curse each one for a different reason.

From the repo, it signs natively on macOS and falls back to a cloud signing server (shortcut-signing-server). That fallback matters -- without macOS you would have to reverse-engineer Apple signing format yourself, and it changes across iOS versions. The hosted signing server is really what makes the whole cross-platform toolchain viable.

What you're doing is visual programming. On its own there isn't anything wrong with it. However, specifically with Shortcuts it's not very pleasant for anything complex.

I had a full garden automation running on shortcuts, but it was extreme hard to maintain and improve due to "editor" being so bare bones.

Main difference is language style.

Cherri feels like your writing Go.

Jelly feels like your writing JavaScript / Swift.

You can definitely have Claude work with cherri files.

Jelly was a confusing experience for me, with JellyCuts becoming closed source and focusing on advertising, then Open-Jellycore branching out but not actually keeping up with the latest shortcut actions.

Cherri has almost every action you can find in the Shortcuts app, easy to use, and easy to create Shortcuts that can accept input and output so that they can be automated or scripted further.

You’ll have challenges with this too but you can get something by working with the three top labs’ models. Tried on Arena.ai and sent any errors back (in a personal effort to further iOS accessibility, but I digress).

Wonderful project, thank you Cherri!

The biggest problem IMO is the loooooooong animation delay built into every UI interaction. It's so hard to get into a flow state or even maintain a train of thought when you have to wait for everything on the screen to stop sliding, wiggling, wobbling, jiggling, refracting, distorting, and flashing.

It does seem like the logical automation platform to prepare repeatable tasks that the end user might want to do.

The permissions and secure app integration models are all there, and it’s reasonably stable.

It was always puzzling why there was never an exportable scripting language, just shareable links. I think I ended up sharing screen shots with Claude last time I wanted to troubleshoot something.

Apple had the same typo at WWDC 2018: https://devdude.me/blimg/wwdc18Keynote/shortcutsApp.png

I'm sure the UX would suck, but you could use hcl2json[0] and then transform that to YAML.

[0]: https://github.com/tmccombs/hcl2json

It's been around for a long time. It's from well before vibe-coding was a thing. I first saw it ~3 years ago.

Should we rename fruit as well just in case?