Apple will let you build workflows using AI in its new Shortcuts app(techcrunch.com)

Shortcuts always felt like the cousin nobody invited to the family photo, and bolting an LLM onto it might finally give the ops team at my company a reason to stop building Zapier flows that cost us $40k a year. Curious whether the on-device model handles branching logic or just the easy summarize-and-route stuff.

Agreed, the productivity numbers in these demos never survive contact with real workflows. We piloted Shortcuts with AI actions across a 12-person mobile team and the time saved was eaten by debugging non-deterministic outputs in steps that used to be one-line scripts.

Tried wiring Shortcuts into our release checklist last week and it shaved maybe 4 minutes off a 45 minute process before the model hallucinated a build number that didn't exist. The 9% time savings evaporated the moment a junior shipped the bad number to TestFlight and we spent an hour rolling back.

Does the AI build steps from a plain-language prompt, or just suggest actions inside the existing visual editor?

Shortcuts has technically supported automation since 2018, and the dropoff rate on my team tells the story: of 11 devs I onboarded to a custom Shortcuts pipeline last year, 2 still use it because debugging a failed action gives you no stack trace, just a red box. Bolting an LLM onto that means I now get to guess why the AI step picked the wrong variable instead of why my hardcoded one did.