Introducing Shortcuts Playground: Create Apple Shortcuts with Claude Code or Codex - MacStories

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Introducing Shortcuts Playground: Create Apple Shortcuts with Claude Code or Codex

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Shortcuts Playground in Claude Code.

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.

How Shortcuts Playground Started, and Why I’m Doing This

Shortcuts Playground started as a fork of an open-source skill; since January, I iterated on it every single day with Claude and Codex, reverse-engineered how Shortcuts actions work on Apple’s latest operating systems, and ended up creating something vastly more complex and reliable than the original skill I discovered at the beginning of the year. Eventually, I landed on a native plugin format that is especially nice to use in Claude Code since it supports dedicated commands, agents, and hooks.

I tested Shortcuts Playground with hundreds of shortcuts. Like any other non-deterministic output generated by agents, it does not generate shortcuts that are guaranteed to be 100% accurate . I strongly advise you to always take a look at a generated shortcut and make sure it is doing what you requested. You may occasionally need to connect a few of the missing variables yourself.

The way I see it, Shortcuts Playground can take you 90% of the way to a complete, fully-functioning shortcut; the remaining 10% needs to be checked and refined by you. In my tests, Shortcuts Playground was able to one-shot dozens of simple shortcuts based on Apple’s built-in actions as well as complex shortcuts that involved web APIs, advanced conditional logic, SSH and shell scripting, and more.

All these shortcuts were autonomously created by Shortcuts Playground and Claude Code.

Shortcuts Playground’s output is heavily influenced by which coding agent and model you use. I recommend using Shortcuts Playground with either Claude Opus 4.6/4.7 (at Medium/High reasoning level) or GPT-5.5 (Medium or High level) as the underlying model for best results. Opus 4.7 with Fast mode at High reasoning is very nice and speedy; GPT-5.5 at High with Fast mode is also quite impressive.

All of this may seem strange coming from me.

For the better part of my career writing at MacStories since 2009, I explored the then-nascent field of iOS automation and eventually embraced Workflow, which was then acquired by Apple and relaunched as Shortcuts. Beyond my iPad coverage and annual iOS reviews, I’ve made a name for myself in a tiny corner of the Internet by being the guy who wanted to automate everything with Shortcuts. With Shortcuts Playground, I am, in many ways, obviating the need for someone like myself – an expert in building automations by hand, the old-fashioned way. If you think about it, releasing Shortcuts Playground seems like a counterintuitive move from a financial standpoint for me: if anyone can now make shortcuts with natural language, they’ll no longer...