Will Shortcuts Survive the Agents Era?

Hello and welcome to another episode of MacStories Unwind. I'm John Voorhees and I have Federico Viticci with me. Hey, Viticci. Yes, hi. I'm very tired, Federico, again. Again, very tired. That will be clear soon. Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I like went from feeling okay as soon as our reviews were out to feeling really kind of tired in the middle of the week. I did not get my usual rest. Yeah, and I'm trying to get back to a normal sleep schedule. I've been getting up way too early and going to bed way too early. I just get, that's how I end up getting. Way too late, way too late, getting to bed late and waking up early. Oh, yeah, that's like a, hey, Federico, I've got some hardware to show off. I have. Okay. I have the new Apple Watch Ultra. Speaking of not having the time, I got my Series 12 ceramic Apple Watch today. You know where it is, John? Not here. It's in a box, probably. It's in a box in my closet. Yeah, I mean, look, all I did was plug it in and set it up. And, you know, it's so, I set it up so recently that most of my complications are blank right now because some of the apps that I use have not finished downloading onto my watch. But, you know what, the UI is snappy. I will give it that. I have not. Is it snappy? It's snappy. Have you tried Siri AI? I have not. I have not done that yet. I have something really weird happened with me. Oh, Siri AI the other day. I was trying to respond to a message in my car on CarPlay asking Jennifer a question following up from a text she sent me. And instead, Siri AI came on and started telling me about breakfast foods. Siri AI came on for me today. I was, so every time I take my dogs for a walk, when we come back up in the apartment, we have these like wet wipes. And we used to clean their paws and clean their, you know, because they've been around, they've been outside. Sure. And I don't know, I must have done something when I crouched to clean them. Oh, you probably pressed the button with your wrist. Suddenly, no, not on my watch, on my phone. I think with my elbow, I must have like, my phone was in my pocket. And maybe with my elbow, I accidentally pressed on the phone. So basically, I hear, calling Stephen. Was it calling Stephen Hackett? I think. But then I quickly stopped. And for some reason, I said, no, no, no, something like that. And then, as I was writing a few minutes ago, a reminder popped up on my Mac saying, call Stephen. So, I have no idea what Siri AI wants me to do with Stephen today. I didn't even, obviously, I was talking to my dogs. None of them is named Stephen. No, that's true. I have no idea why. But maybe they should be now. I don't know. Maybe they should be. Maybe they should, you know, I don't know. Anyway. Federico, I actually have a real topic for us today. Okay. I was putting together the Club Mac Stories newsletter today. And it occurred to me how I wasn't really using the shortcuts that I had developed years ago for parts of the newsletter anymore. That it's all going through Codex. That, in a lot of ways, Codex has become so much easier. Like, to give you an example, we do a section called App Radar. And App Radar has an icon of the app we're talking about, a link to the app, and then, you know, a short written couple of paragraphs. And the icons I've always made with a shortcut. You know what? Codex can do that even easier because I can just rattle off with my voice dictate saying, give me, you know, an icon for this one, this one, this one, this one. And then give me the links and link them to the name of the app. And it just comes back, you know, automatically uses your CLI for MS Images, uploads the image to our CDN. I get the URL back. I just drop it into the document. Super easy. And there's just a lot of little things like that where I find I'm using shortcuts less and less just because I have to go someplace, which is the shortcuts app. Or, you know, wherever up in the menu bar and run it. And I don't have to do that anymore if I'm already working in Codex doing things like finding, you know, finding like release notes for an app. It's just especially with apps, it's super easy because the iTunes search API, I can say, just give me the what's new section and the icon and the name and the link. And I get all those three pieces all in one place that I can use both to reference while I'm writing, but also to get the pieces like the URL that have to be dropped into the article too. Yeah, this is part of a bigger conversation about what's happening with automation, right? But with what these coding agents and just in general, these agentic assistants have done, you know, whether you use OpenClaw or Hermes Agent or GrokBot or Muse by Meta, which, by the way, we haven't really paid attention to. It is now, I just saw Muse by Meta is the number one most downloaded free app on the US App Store. Wow, it was like two or three a week ago, I think. It was two as of a few days ago and it finally dethroned ChatGPT, which has been the most downloaded free app for years. For a long time. For a long time. Yeah, yeah. I've been thinking about trying Muse. I haven't tried it yet though. So that's a separate conversation. But what these assistants have shown is that when you have an agent that can do whatever you want on demand, the need for a traditional deterministic static, if you will, automation diminishes. Because why invest the time into creating a repeatable automation, you know, and following a deterministic set of rules and syntax when whatever you want, whether it's just a one-off task or something that you run once a week can just be a prompt away in an agent. Right? So this is an interesting change happening to automation. I think Apple is going to ride this wave. I mean, just look at shortcuts in iOS and macOS 27. It now lets you create shortcuts with natural language. But one has to wonder if this is a band-aid, right, for something that is eventually going to go away. Right? Because think about it this way. It's a transition, right? Because like all of that, if Siri AI, the reason why I call this like a stopgap or a band-aid solution is that if Siri AI were that much smarter, like Codex level smart or Muse by Metal smart or Grokbot level smart, you know, all of these frontier models. If Siri AI was backed by a really intelligent model, you could ask any kind of thing that you can create in shortcuts and Siri AI would just do it for you. Right? You wouldn't need the intermediary step. You wouldn't need an app like shortcuts to do the work for you. It would just be done by the agent the first time. Shortcuts right now is for power users, something that you can slot in between you and your tasks and Siri AI, right? Right. Eventually, you have to believe that for most users, and again, just take a look at the most downloaded free apps on the App Store. Those are pretty great indicators of what people are actually doing on their phones. If people get used, and I mean, 1.1 billion active users, I think people are pretty used to chat GPT at this point. Yeah. But if people are getting used to chat GPT, and if people are getting used to Muse by Metal, and if their brains get rewired into thinking of, they don't think of automation. They just think of things to get done and tasks to be offloaded to a little robot somewhere in the cloud. They will not even develop the interest to sit down and think, oh, how can I automate this? It's going to be the equivalent of learning how to fix a car by yourself, as opposed to getting into a self-driving car. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think you're right. And, you know, you think of it too. It's like even, you could argue that Shortcuts, the place for shortcuts still, is the repeatable stuff. On the other hand, that's really what skills are for. Yes, I have repeatable automations in codecs. That's where I was going with this. For nine months at this point, and they're just fine. Yeah, they are. I mean, that's how I'm doing the uploading to our CDN and how I'm doing these. You know, I had Codex go out and to the Apple Design Resources page, find the mask for icons, download that, and then pull the square art from the iTunes Search API, mask it, upload it. And it's all just a really simple skill that adds those three steps together, uploads it, and returns a URL to me. Because it knows I don't want the image. I just want the – that was the first thing it did the first time. It said, no, I don't want the image. I want the URL from the CDN so I can drop it into our document. So, yeah, I mean, that's a lot like doing a shortcut without having to think about, oh, how do you mask a thing in shortcuts? Where do – you know, what kind of parameters do I need to have here? How do I resize an image so that it fits with the mask and all that stuff? Let me put this on the record so that we have evidence for the future. Before iOS 29 – actually, no, by the time that iOS 29 rolls around. But it also – it might as well be iOS 28 next year. But I'm saying within the next couple of years, we will have Siri AI automations. There will be an automations tab in the Siri app on your phone. And you can just control automations that just do things in Siri, on your phone, on your Mac, in third-party apps or first-party apps. And it's all just done with a prompt and a conversation, just like in Codex. I would go one step further, Federico. I would go one step further and argue that if we still have shortcuts at that point, shortcuts will be something different. Shortcuts will be the agent that builds apps for you. Maybe. That's a bridge too far for you? I think at some point something's got to give in the sense that at some point the editor, the shortcuts editor, likely becomes an obstacle. Yeah. Because you probably just want whatever Siri AI agent you will have on your device to be able to create things on the fly that go beyond the structure and the GUI of the editor of shortcuts. So, yeah, I mean – We're already kind of there. I mean, the editor's hidden by default. We're already kind of there. It's hidden by default. It may sound crazy right now, but it's not too crazy to imagine that the editor will actually go away or it'll be marked as a deprecated thing, just like Automator was. Right. It's the legacy view in a lot of ways. Yeah. So I think automation is changing. It'll be interesting to see what shape it takes. Because even if it's all done by an agent and by AI, automation by definition needs controls. It needs triggers. It needs – it's not just a chat. It's a glorified chat with inputs and outputs and triggers and conditions. And tools and all the tools. I think it's an interesting – all the tools. I think it's an interesting challenge for designers to convey this new nature of automation. I think maybe GrokBot does a nice job with it. It's a conversation, but it's also a sidebar. I think Kodaks does a really nice job with it. So I think Anthropic, they have routines. All of these companies are doing it. And so I think Apple will realistically do it. Maybe not next year, but for sure by – if they don't do it by iOS 29, I would be really surprised. Well, and I think if companies like – if things like GrokBot and Muse can do this, certainly Apple can do an even better job with having its hooks into the system. Because third-party apps are already doing some pretty remarkable stuff with these things. Yeah. Well, that's a conversation about automation, John. Yeah. I've been thinking about it. I was just working away this morning. I'm always there for some automation, you know. Yeah, you know. I was automating away this morning. It got me thinking. Do you have any picks for us this week, Federico? Not really. We started watching – we put on pause Ted Lasso Season 4 again. We started watching it, but Silvia fell asleep because she was really tired. Yeah. I started playing Splatoon Raiders on my Switch 2. What do you think? I've only played a little bit. I find it quite enjoyable. I appreciate the loot collecting mechanic. I think it's very – it's a perfect game to unwind without thinking much. Yeah. And I appreciate the lack of, like, competitive multiplayer. I am not in a place in my life right now where I can deal with that stress. And so I've always been fascinated by the character design and the mechanics of Splatoon. But the multiplayer and the competitive nature was too much for me, so I am stoked that they've made a single-player, you know, game revolving around collecting loot and upgrades. Yeah. So it's a perfect sort of end-of-summer game for me right now. That's awesome. But yeah, that's the only little bit of unwinding that I've been doing over the past month or so. Yeah. I feel like I have a big backlog of video games, and I don't even know what the backlog is in some respects because I got so out of tune for a while. We're all very scattered. Yeah, exactly. The one thing that I did this week is I picked up the latest season of Slow Horses. Now, there's only been one episode so far, but it was a really nice introduction back into the show. It picked up right where the last season left off, and, you know, at least judging from one episode, it seems if you liked Slow Horses before, you'll probably like this season just as well. I had a good time watching it. And I was very disappointed it was just the one episode. They're not doing like the two-episode drop or anything like that. So got to keep watching that and probably get back into Ted Lasso. I actually got an episode behind Jennifer on that, so I don't know what we're going to do there. Maybe I'll have to watch it on my iPad or something one of these days and then both get back into it. All right. All right, Federico. Well, I think that's it for this week's episode of Unwind. Stay tuned on Mac Stories. We've got some cool stuff coming next week. You know, it's the fall. It's full of surprises and new things, and I'll have something coming probably like a week after that. I mean, there's all kinds of things happening right now. You can find us over at macstories.net and, of course, on social media where Federico is at Faticci. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I, and I'm at John Voorhees. J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-E-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John.