David Pierce, writing for The Verge:
Still, there is something about Shortcuts that feels like a model for implementing AI. It’s not flashy or overwrought, and it’s not AI as an entirely new revolutionary interface that will change how you do everything forever and just trust me bro AI is the new UI. It’s not trying to be creative or proactive, it’s there to do what AI actually does well: figure out what you’re asking for and navigate the databases to try and make it happen.
These natural-language shortcuts are effectively just vibe-coding projects, which is slightly ironic, given Apple’s apparently hostile stance toward the vibe-coding apps on its platform. But rather than let you vibe-code an app, Apple’s just letting you vibe-code your phone. You tell it how you’d like it to work, and it sets out to make it happen. And because Apple has unique access to everything from your location to your app logins, it can do so in a vastly more powerful way.
I disagree on the vibe-coding part. Apple built this on App Intents, the framework developers already use to connect their app workflows with Siri. The AI layer sits on top and translates plain-English requests into structured calls that the system already knows how to execute. That constraint is a feature, not a bug, because the model cannot hallucinate an action that App Intents doesn’t support.
AI with a defined scope might prove more useful to us than AI promising to replace every interface we have.