Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct

I've just used this extensively to build 200 Shortcuts for my event-based automation app on macOS [0], because some actions you simply can't do without Shortcuts: changing Focus Mode, toggling Accessibility functions like Color Filters, accessing the Private Cloud Compute model etc.

I also wrote about how Claude was able to basically learn the language from scratch and write those fully compilable Shortcuts for me [1] because it was mind boggling to me that an LLM can do that. Curiously, this is becoming more and more normal in my mind.

[0] https://lowtechguys.com/crank

[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/how-good-is-claude-really/#che...

Cool! As a professional programmer few things consistently succeed in making me feel inept like trying to build an Apple Shortcut

Still confused on why there is no social component of this? What is the best place to find examples of actual useful Apple Shortcuts?

I built a small app to follow my infant son's feedings and diaper changes. Simply used the shortcuts get content of url to call the API rest endpoints. This is much better !

Is this vibe coded? The README at least looks very LLM-ish.

What can you do on a Mac with Shortcuts vs AppleScript vs Hammerspoon?

Looks quite cool and I'd like to give a try. What is the main use case for compiling code to shortcuts? I ask because I'm working on a tool[0] that in a way does the opposite.

[0] https://breadboards.io

Very cool! IMHO Apple Shortcuts will finally get the love they're due in the age of AI.

whither AppleScript?

I’m interested to understand how this is different than Jelly; they seem to be similar. Same for Scriptable. I’ve been looking at this to hand over to Claude to build Shortcuts, something which has a terrible development experience.

Could you explain more about how the signing setup works?

(That's what held me back most for spending more effort on shortcuts.)

"shortuct"

Adjacently, does anyone know of a Terraform-like syntax for creating GitHub Actions YML files?

While it's not in quite the same product category, a name change might be in order; this is uncomfortably close to CHERI (cf. https://cheri-alliance.org/).