with ios27, apple shipped siri ai shortcut generation / editing. it’s pretty unusable. maybe this perspective comes from being a software engineer and having the fundamental concepts of looping, etc. in mind, but to me, it feels like spending 15min to just look through all the available actions could help establish a mental model that would enable you to create the shortcut that you want AND you leave having LEARNED how it works, enabling you to improve it in the future.

i was excited when apple add siri ai to shortcuts. at first, because i thought i could truly one-shot shortcuts with ai — the dream. when this turned out to not be true, i figured at least it could help me edit my existing shortcuts. this also turned out to suck. but even worse. i had written a pretty complicated shortcut, but i needed a tweak to remove a notification that was halting the shortcut from proceeding, so i asked siri ai how i could fix this. it wiped out my entire shortcut — which worked really well except the notification — and rewrote the whole thing, worse, and had the same issue. i just wanted ai to help me understand the issue that i was encountering.