After months of work and debugging, I launched Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that lets you create shortcuts for Apple’s Shortcuts app with natural language. The plugin is free and open source, and it can be installed in your favorite agent from this repo. You can read more about it in...
Read moreIntroducing Shortcuts Playground: Create Apple Shortcuts with Claude Code or Codex
Today, I’m pleased to introduce something I’ve been working on for the past six months: Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that can create any shortcut for Apple’s Shortcuts app using natural language. With Shortcuts Playground, you can simply prompt Claude Code or Codex with a sentence requesting a shortcut of any kind; a few minutes later, you’ll end up with a real shortcut in Finder, ready to be imported into the Shortcuts app. It’s as simple as that.
Shortcuts Playground is free and open source: anyone can download the plugin from this GitHub repo, where I extensively documented how it works behind the scenes and where you can also inspect the code yourself.
Just point your preferred desktop agent to the repo, and it’ll find the plugin marketplace to install it for you. You can also check out the dedicated mini-site we launched for it at macstories.net/shortcuts-playground.
For Club MacStories+ and Premier members, I’m also releasing Shortcuts Playground as a generative shortcut. It’s quite meta: once you have the main plugin installed on a Mac, you can use a shortcut to make more shortcuts and install them directly on an iPhone, iPad, or other Mac. The Shortcuts Playground shortcut is highly customizable, and I’ve shared a detailed guide for Plus and Premier members here.
As part of this announcement, we’re also launching the completely redesigned MacStories Shortcuts Archive. The new archive is easier to browse with new categories and filters, and it also includes 100 shortcuts that were entirely generated by Shortcuts Playground and verified by me. I figured that it’d be nice to offer concrete evidence of Shortcuts Playground’s capabilities; I think 100 shortcuts should do the trick.
You can read more about the new MacStories Shortcuts Archive here.
Our iOS and iPadOS 27 Wishes
JohnThis week on AppStories, we share our wishes for iOS and iPadOS 27, and for AppStories+ subscribers, we tackle Visual Intelligence and whether there are any use cases that aren’t creepy.
Also available on YouTube here.
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AppStories Episode 485 - Our iOS and iPadOS 27 Wishes
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This episode is sponsored by:
- Steamclock: We make great apps. Design and development, from demos to details.
- Claude: For problems worth solving — get started with Claude today.
My Favorite Tips and Tricks for Working with Codex Inside ChatGPT on iOS
Yesterday, OpenAI rolled out Codex remote access in the ChatGPT app for iPhone and iPad, allowing mobile users to connect to remote instances of the full Codex app running on a Mac. While we could argue about the decision to turn ChatGPT into an “everything app” that contains a chatbot, a Codex remote, and image...
Automation Academy: How I Can Automate Anything I Want Using Codex for Mac
It’s hard to spot long-term trends in the AI world when things are changing so quickly on a weekly basis, but if we try and look back at the first five months of 2026, it’s undeniable that the rise of personal AI agents has been a central theme of the year. What started as a...
Read moreA Dictation App with a CLI Is Exactly What I Needed
As I mentioned in a recent issue of MacStories Weekly for Club members, I believe that reliable dictation and text-to-speech are largely solved problems in the AI industry right now for most languages. There are certainly subtle differences between the latest models and not-so-subtle discrepancies when you consider local (and free) transcription models versus cloud-hosted (and often expensive) solutions, but by and large, LLMs have “fixed” the problem of fast and high-performance speech-to-text transcription. Whether you’re using Superwhisper, Wispr Flow, Aqua Voice, or a local wrapper for Parakeet or Microsoft’s VibeVoice, chances are that your transcribed text will be more than good enough these days. Just like with regular chatbots, benchmarks matter less and less: it’s the overall user experience that defines products that are otherwise very similar to each other.
An App Swap Challenge
This week on AppStories, John and Federico kick off the app swap challenge, with each of them giving the other three apps to use. We’ll be checking in on how it’s going each week with a final roundup of the results of the experiment after WWDC.
On AppStories+, we each pick aspirational apps and OS features that we wish we used more but don’t.
Also available on YouTube here.
We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.
To learn more about an AppStories+ subscription, visit our [Plans page](macstories.net/appstories-plans/, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.
AppStories Episode 484 - An App Swap Challenge
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This episode is sponsored by:
- Steamclock: We make great apps. Design and development, from demos to details.
How I Keep Codex Skills and AGENTS.md In Sync Between Multiple Macs
Earlier this week, prompted by the useful suggestion of a MacStories reader, I finally fixed something that’s been bothering me for months: I consolidated my Codex skills and main AGENTS.md instructions file so that they’re always in sync between multiple Macs. If you’ve been working with coding agents like Codex and Claude Code lately, and...
Codex as a Productivity Super App
This week on AppStories, John shares his tip for moving files with Taildrop before he and Federico dig into Codex and its unique capabilities.
On AppStories+, Federico and John have both returned to Apple Reminders and discuss why and how they’re using it.
Also available on YouTube here.
We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.
To learn more about an AppStories+ subscription, visit our [Plans page](macstories.net/appstories-plans/, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.
AppStories Episode 483 - Codex as a Productivity Super App
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This episode is sponsored by:
- Mercury Weather: Forecasts, beautifully done. Download now for free.