Jason Snell: Shortcuts Is Not Really That Friendly

When discussing a demo of Misty Studio on the M5 MacBook Pro, Jason Snell compared it to Shortcuts as similarly friendly-but-unfriendly tool – a fair criticism.

From Jason Snell, on Upgrade: An LLM in the Woods:

“It’s like me saying, oh, you know, Shortcuts does a pretty good job of being a consumer user scripting utility.

It’s like, well, yeah, but also really no.”

Plus, later:

“I mean, that’s the bottom line is it’s a great idea. And like I said about Misty Studio1, all things considered, it does a pretty good job of being kind of a friendly face to building an AI model, but in the end, it’s like Shortcuts in that it’s not really that friendly.”

Fair enough – if it truly was, I’d have been out of a job for a long time.

Check out the Upgrade podcast on Apple Podcasts and YouTube.2

  1. For reference, they explained Misty Studio earlier:
    > “Misty Studio is a demo that Apple did for the M5. Misty Studio runs an open-source model locally” ↩
  2. P.S. I apologize in advance to Jason for the URL slug 🙂↩

 

Posts You Might Like

Apple embraces AI – Will Siri get smart in iOS 18? »
Jason Snell and Myke Hurley discuss Apple's artificial intelligence investments, the idea of Spotlight as their AI brand, and rumors about Siri improvements coming in iOS 18.
Show More
Shortcuts & Siri: I’m excited to see more
Sharing some initial thoughts on Shortcuts, Siri, and what it means for Apple’s future. Also, you should start using Workflow now.
Show More
Six Colors: Simple sleep tracking with Shortcuts
Show More
All The New Actions for Shortcuts in iOS 17: Multiple Timers, Mail, Passwords, & More
The iOS 17 public is out, and that means new Shortcuts actions – here's the full list available so far, plus my early access shortcuts.
Show More