Write Shortcuts in Code, Not Blocks

If you’ve used an iPhone or a Mac for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen the Shortcuts app sitting there and most people just ignore it. If you don’t know what it is, Shortcuts is Apple’s built-in automation tool where you can do things like send a text at a certain time, resize photos, get your daily weather, combine PDFs, control your smart home, and a lot more. It’s basically a way to build mini programs on your phone without writing code, and you drag blocks around in a visual editor and chain them together.

Each one of those blocks is called an action, and actions are the building blocks of everything in Shortcuts. “Get Clipboard” is an action, “Open App” is an action, “Send Message” is an action. You stack them together and they run in order, and that’s how you build an automation.

The problem is that the Shortcuts app is one of the most underutilized tools Apple has ever made. It’s amazing and you can automate so much of your daily workflow with it, but most people either don’t know it exists or they opened it once and closed it. I’m not most people. I love making shortcuts.

The Problem With Building Them

Here’s the thing though. The process of actually building shortcuts in the Shortcuts app is tedious. You’re dragging blocks around in a visual editor, rearranging things, scrolling through lists of actions trying to find the one you want. If you’ve got a shortcut with 30 or 40 actions, it gets messy fast. There’s no way to search and replace, there’s no way to copy a chunk of logic and paste it somewhere else cleanly. I’ve always wanted a better way to do this. I wanted to write shortcuts the way I write code, in a text file with actual structure.

What Already Exists

There are tools out there that have tried to solve this. Jelly Cuts is one I’ve looked at, and the idea is similar where you write shortcuts in a text-based format. But the problem with Jelly Cuts and some of these other projects is that they don’t have all the updated actions. Apple adds new actions every year with new OS releases, and these projects fall behind. If you can’t use the latest actions, you’re stuck going back to the visual editor anyway and that defeats the purpose.

I wanted something I could keep updated, and something the community could keep updated.

Introducing Perspective Cuts

So I built it. It’s called perspective-cuts, and it’s open source on GitHub at github.com/taylorarndt/perspective-cuts.

It’s a CLI tool where you write your shortcuts in a text-based language, and it compiles them into real .shortcut files that you can import directly into the Shortcuts app. Code in, shortcut out. You write your automation in a text file, run the command, and you get a shortcut file you can double-click and install. No dragging blocks, no scrolling through menus, just write what you want it to do and compile it.

I wanted to release this as open source because everyone should be able to benefit from it. Shortcuts are for everyone, and the tools to build them should be too. Whether you’ve gotten frustrated with the visual editor, you’re a developer who wants to version control your shortcuts, or you just want a faster way to build automations, this is what I built it for.

Learn What You Can Do With Shortcuts

If you’re new to shortcuts or you want to see what other people are building, we actually have a community for that. It’s called Beyond The Gallery, and you can check it out at beyondthegallery.app. It’s a place where people share their shortcuts, learn from each other, and figure out what’s possible with automations on Apple platforms. If you’re the kind of person who downloads a shortcut and wants to understand how it works, or you’ve got one you’re proud of and want to share it, that’s what the community is for.

Why Open Source

I could’ve kept this to myself, but that’s not the point. I want to help everybody make shortcuts more easily, and the whole community benefits when tools like this are out in the open. People can add actions, fix bugs, build on top of it, and that’s how good software gets made.

What About AI Shortcuts in iOS 27

There are rumors floating around that Apple might introduce AI-powered shortcut creation in iOS 27, but we don’t know if that’s true and Apple hasn’t confirmed anything. Even if they do, I want to keep this project going because having a text-based way to write shortcuts is useful regardless of what Apple does. AI-generated shortcuts and hand-written shortcuts can coexist, and frankly if Apple does add AI shortcuts, having a project like this that understands the shortcut format will be even more valuable for the community.

It’s Experimental

I want to be upfront about this. Perspective-cuts is experimental right now. It works, but it’s early and there are actions that need to be added and edge cases that need to be handled. That’s why it’s open source. I’m not pretending this is a finished product, I’m putting it out there because I think the idea is strong and I want people to help build it.

If you’re a developer and you’re interested in Apple Shortcuts, go check out the repo. Open issues, submit pull requests, tell me what actions you need and tell me what’s broken. That is how we make this thing great.

What Do You Think

I want to hear from you on this one. Do you use Shortcuts? Have you tried building complex automations and gotten frustrated with the visual editor? Or maybe you didn’t even know Shortcuts existed until right now. Either way, drop a comment below and tell me what you’d build with a tool like this, and tell me what actions matter most to you.

The repo is at github.com/taylorarndt/perspective-cuts. Go star it, go fork it, go break it and tell me what happened.

Thank you for reading.