alt Hacker NewsApple Shortcuts have felt like a blatantly obvious AI play to me for a while now.
The interface for creating them manually has been so bad for so long, it feels clear to me that LLM-driven shortcut orchestration was always the endgame. Apple built up their ecosystem of composable "tools", and then trained an LLM on how to call them.
The result, IMO, is the first OpenClaw/Hermes competitor that's feasible for use by the general public.
Everyone with a paid Claude or ChatGPT that they're struggling to use to the fullest is going to have very little reason not to swap over to an upgraded iCloud+ plan (if they don't already have one). I suspect we're going to see mass cancellation of $20/mo plans very soon.
OpenAI's timing for removing their temporary increased usage limits is looking pretty unfortunate...
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I think Shortcuts has a few massive flaws that would give me pause enshrining it as middleware for an important thing like a "mainstream OpenClaw".
1 is performance. It's slow. You can run one within the app and literally watch execution flow from one block to the next. Absurd, for the CPU power at hand.
2 is reliance on developers to deliberately implement hooks and "intents" when the developers of at least half of apps including most "big company" apps do not care to bother, often because 95% of their app's surface is actually cross-platform stuff.
Example: There are no shortcut actions for Google Calendar, and Gmail only has one real one which is a generic send email. No "search email" etc.
I'd rather see Apple lean into "computer use" to allow it to use any app that displays things on the screen, but IDK how you make that safe.
Why do I need shortcuts though, I want that to be transparent.