Apple’s best AI concept looks like vibe coding in Shortcuts and Safari

Many of Apple’s recent AI ideas are similar to everyone else’s AI ideas. Chatbot you can ask questions; quick ways to create or summarize text; amazing, borderline awesome photo editing tools. The company paid Most of the highlights of WWDC play with AI skills, to announce Siri you can already find it on Android phones with the Claude and ChatGPT apps. The words, usually, are “this thing you know, but on your iPhone now.”

But a few minutes after I downloaded the first iPadOS 26 program (I didn’t want to risk it on my Mac or iPhone, all of which are very important in my daily life to install one of Apple’s well-known betas and break the battery), I found one of the few ways that Apple can make the best AI product. I opened the Shortcuts app, clicked the Plus button to create a new shortcut, and typed “Send a message to Anna with three emojis.” This is what I do every now and then, to let my wife know I’m thinking about her. A few seconds powered by Apple Intelligence later, the shortcut was working – I clicked it, and it sent the appropriate emoji to Anna’s right. Thank you very much.

Apple Shortcuts have always been a good idea for a simple interface. It’s a very powerful tool, especially a way for users to create scripts that are responsive and across applications. But even creating shortcuts can be difficult and easy, and the software doesn’t exactly help you. At WWDC, Apple introduced AI as a way to make the app easier to use. Cecilia Dantas, the company’s marketing manager, said the new system is “more accessible than ever.”

In the first beta, it doesn’t work. I’ve never done anything more complicated than emoji texting. I asked for a shortcut that would turn on Do Not Disturb only when I opened the Kindle app and instead I got a shortcut that turns on Do Not Disturb every time I cut the shortcut. I asked for one that would put my device in Do Not Disturb, and start a 30 minute timer with “Stop Playing” as the setting in the “When the Timer Ends” section, but the “Stop Playing” key did not work even after following the steps. I asked for a shortcut that took a picture with the front camera, then the back camera, then connected them side by side, and saved the results to the Photos program. The shortcuts understood all the steps correctly! back to the normal editor.

However, there’s something about Shortcuts that feels like an AI implementation model. It’s not flashy or flashy, and it’s not AI like a new revolutionary interface that will change the way you do everything forever and just trust me brother AI is the new UI. It’s not trying to create or act, it’s there to do what AI does best: find what you’re asking for and run the database to try to make it happen.

These natural language shortcuts are useful just vibe-coding projectswhich is a little surprising, given Apple’s apparently a hostile situation for vibe-coding apps on its platform. But instead of letting you vibe-code an app, Apple is just letting you vibe-code your phone. You tell it how you want it to work, and it adjusts to make it work. And because Apple has access to everything from your location to your app’s access point, it can do this with a lot of power.

Doing this works, of course, will be a very big job. The kind of Shortcuts that work, sometimes, are complete failures. Apple needs to convince every developer in the store to support Shortcuts as much as possible, so that anything a user wants to do in their app can be done through Shortcuts. That’s a great question, because there are many reasons why developers would want to avoid this like the plague, starting with the fact that using Shortcuts means not opening their app at all. If Apple can’t get everyone on board with App Purpose, it has to hope that its AI models can figure out different APIs, URLs, and other ways to use apps on behalf of the user. This is the eternal problem of agetic AI, of course, and Apple will face it in its own way.

Apple’s new vibe-coding app should be a little more straightforward. In addition to using AI to automatically create and distribute Safari tabs, the new operating system now lets you create browser extensions in a more natural way. Just type “copy this page as a Markdown link,” and, poof, the extension is created. The simple things I’ve tried have worked so far and are easy to make. It seems that they cannot use AI or interact with other programs, however, the most ambitious thing you can do is to update websites. Similar to Shortcuts, however, the point is clear: This is a way to design your own tools the way you want them, without building them from scratch.

Apple spent a lot of time at WWDC explaining the tools it created to help people (and especially children) use their devices a little more, and one of the best ways to do this is to make it easier to do what we do on our phones. We all have our favorite tasks, our smartphone idiosyncrasies. We’ve spent twenty years opening and closing apps, swiping and tapping, copying and pasting, moving between things we don’t know. Now, AI companies are trying to create a better way, a new platform where you have to ask and do. They are all trying to create great apps that become your digital home for everything.

Apple already has it. It’s called the iPhone. If Apple can make all these things work – make no mistake, it’s still a big if – it has the opportunity to use this new technology not to reinvent everything but to make everything easier.