Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct

I've just used this extensively to build 200 Shortcuts for my event-based automation app on macOS [0], because some actions you simply can't do without Shortcuts: changing Focus Mode, toggling Accessibility functions like Color Filters, accessing the Private Cloud Compute model etc.

I also wrote about how Claude was able to basically learn the language from scratch and write those fully compilable Shortcuts for me [1] because it was mind boggling to me that an LLM can do that. Curiously, this is becoming more and more normal in my mind.

[0] https://lowtechguys.com/crank

[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/how-good-is-claude-really/#che...

Cool! As a professional programmer few things consistently succeed in making me feel inept like trying to build an Apple Shortcut

Oh boy!

Creating/maintaining Shortcuts is such a pain!

Having to do it on a small iPhone screen with a touchscreen keyboard, through a no-code interface...

I want an actual text editor, I want to version things with git...

It feels like with Cherri I'll finally be able to actually do things!

Thanks!

I take it this only supports Apple’s built-in actions, and doesn’t plug into the broader AppIntents system? AppIntents includes a packaging concept, would be cool to see if this could use third-party AppIntents in a similar way to how scientific Python uses C modules for performance critical sections.

Still confused on why there is no social component of this? What is the best place to find examples of actual useful Apple Shortcuts?

What can you do on a Mac with Shortcuts vs AppleScript vs Hammerspoon?

Love this approach of compiling a readable language to a platform-specific format. Same pattern works well for i18n. Write in one language, compile/translate to the target formats automatically. The developer experience of writing real code instead of clicking through a GUI (Shortcuts app in this case) is always the right bet for power users

Could you explain more about how the signing setup works?

(That's what held me back most for spending more effort on shortcuts.)

I'm guessing that if Apple can get it right with the next LLM based Siri, generating or editing Shortcuts may get easier anyway.

Looks quite cool and I'd like to give a try. What is the main use case for compiling code to shortcuts? I ask because I'm working on a tool[0] that in a way does the opposite.

[0] https://breadboards.io

I built a small app to follow my infant son's feedings and diaper changes. Simply used the shortcuts get content of url to call the API rest endpoints. This is much better !

I’m interested to understand how this is different than Jelly; they seem to be similar. Same for Scriptable. I’ve been looking at this to hand over to Claude to build Shortcuts, something which has a terrible development experience.

This makes me want to spend some time with Codex just to figure out something fun to do with Shortcuts!

Very cool! IMHO Apple Shortcuts will finally get the love they're due in the age of AI.

I wish Apple hadn’t gone with shortcuts. Instead I wish they’d given us a proper sdk for iOS and macOS as a Python module.

Python is so easy to pick up they could have given it a low code drag and drop front end but for us who can code why not a proper language ?

"shortuct"

whither AppleScript?

Adjacently, does anyone know of a Terraform-like syntax for creating GitHub Actions YML files?

typo in title: "Shortuct" instead of "Shortcut" - is this how we're gonna distinguish from llm? /s

Is this vibe coded? The README at least looks very LLM-ish.

While it's not in quite the same product category, a name change might be in order; this is uncomfortably close to CHERI (cf. https://cheri-alliance.org/).