Viticci Ships Shortcuts Playground for Natural-Language Automation

*Federico Viticci has released a plugin that turns plain-English descriptions into working Apple Shortcuts.*

Federico Viticci announced Shortcuts Playground this week. The tool lets users describe an automation in ordinary language and receive a finished Shortcut ready for Apple’s platforms.

The project took six months to build. It works as a plugin for Claude Code and Codex, two AI coding environments. Once installed, the plugin accepts a natural-language request and outputs a complete Shortcut file.

Shortcuts Playground targets the existing Shortcuts app rather than replacing it. Users still run the resulting automations inside Apple’s own runtime on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The difference lies in how the Shortcut is created: text prompts replace manual step-by-step assembly.

No third-party benchmarks or adoption numbers appear in the announcement. Viticci positions the release as an experiment in “vibe-coded” automation, where intent expressed in prose becomes executable code.

Why it matters

The change lowers the barrier for people who understand what they want an automation to do but have never learned Shortcuts’ visual editor. Whether that produces more reliable or more fragile workflows remains to be seen; the first test will be how often the generated Shortcuts require manual fixes once they reach a device.

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Sources:

• Six Colors

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