by Jason Snell
Get a peek at the future of vibe-coded automation
This week Federico Viticci of MacStories launched Shortcuts Playground, which brings natural language automation to Apple’s platforms:
Today, I’m pleased to introduce something I’ve been working on for the past six months: Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that can create any shortcut for Apple’s Shortcuts app using natural language. With Shortcuts Playground, you can simply prompt Claude Code or Codex with a sentence requesting a shortcut of any kind; a few minutes later, you’ll end up with a real shortcut in Finder, ready to be imported into the Shortcuts app. It’s as simple as that.
As you might expect, there is a lot of complexity behind this simplicity. Also, Viticci expects his approach to be eclipsed by Apple’s announcements at WWDC. This doesn’t make this any less of an accomplishment, and it’s especially exciting to consider that we are entering an era where building user automations now requires nothing more complex than a text-entry field.