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.

October 21, 2025
2:52 pm

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

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” ↩
P.S. I apologize in advance to Jason for the URL slug 🙂↩

Jason Snell, Linked, M5, mac, MacBook Pro, Misty Studio, podcasts, Quotes, Shortcuts, Upgrade

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