Apple’s best AI idea looks a lot like vibe coding

Most of Apple’s current AI ideas are roughly the same as everyone else’s AI ideas. A chatbot you can ask questions; quick ways to create or summarize text; bizarre, borderline creepy image-generation tools. The company spent most of its WWDC keynote playing catch-up with the state of the AI art, announcing Siri features you can already find on Android phones and in the Claude and ChatGPT apps. The pitch, in so many cases, is just “this thing you know, but on your iPhone now.”

Apple’s best AI idea looks a lot like vibe coding

Siri AI and Image Playground will get all the hype, but Apple can actually make our lives better in Safari and Shortcuts.

But a few minutes after I downloaded the first developer beta of iPadOS 18 (I didn’t want to risk it on my Mac or my iPhone, both of which are too important to my daily life to install one of Apple’s notoriously buggy and battery-crushing first betas), I found one of the few ways in which Apple can make a genuinely better AI product. I opened up the Shortcuts app, pressed the Plus button to create a new shortcut, and typed “Send a text to Anna with three kissy emojis.” This is a thing I do from time to time, just to let my wife know I’m thinking of her. A few Apple Intelligence-powered seconds later, the shortcut was up and running — I tapped it, and it sent the right emoji to the right Anna. Thank goodness.

Apple Shortcuts has always been a good idea in desperate need of a simpler interface. It’s a hugely powerful tool, essentially a way for users to visually create scripts that take actions automatically and across apps. But even creating simple shortcuts can be complex and brittle, and the app itself doesn’t exactly help you along. At WWDC, though, Apple touted AI as the way to make the app easier to use. Cecilia Dantas, a product marketing manager at the company, called the new system “more approachable than ever.”

In the first beta, it mostly doesn’t work. I haven’t successfully rigged up anything more complicated than texting emoji. I asked for a shortcut that would turn on Do Not Disturb automatically when I opened the Kindle app and instead just got a shortcut that turned on Do Not Disturb whenever I tapped the shortcut. I asked for one that would put my device into Do Not Disturb, and start a 30-minute timer with “Stop Playing” as the setting in the “When Timer Ends” section, but the key “Stop Playing” step didn’t work even after some follow-up requests. I asked for a shortcut that took a photo with the front camera, then the rear camera, then stitched them together side by side, and saved the result to the Photos app. Shortcuts understood all the steps correctly! And failed every time. Whenever I tried to make a shortcut that involved a third-party app, Shortcuts directed me back to the standard editor. It appears developers have some work to do to support the new feature.

Still, there is something about Shortcuts that feels like a model for implementing AI. It’s not flashy or overwrought, and it’s not AI as an entirely new revolutionary interface that will change how you do everything forever and just trust me bro AI is the new UI. It’s not trying to be creative or proactive, it’s there to do what AI actually does well: figure out what you’re asking for and navigate the databases to try and make it happen.

These natural-language shortcuts are effectively just vibe-coding projects, which is slightly ironic, given Apple’s apparently hostile stance toward the vibe-coding apps on its platform. But rather than let you vibe-code an app, Apple’s just letting you vibe-code your phone. You tell it how you’d like it to work, and it sets out to make it happen. And because Apple has unique access to everything from your location to your app logins, it can do so in a vastly more powerful way.

Making this actually work will, of course, be an outrageously huge amount of work. A version of Shortcuts that kind of works, some of the time, is in fact a total failure. Apple has to quickly convince every developer in the store to support Shortcuts as thoroughly as possible, so that anything a user could possibly want to do in their app they can do through Shortcuts. That’s a big ask, given there are lots of good reasons developers might want to avoid this feature like the plague, starting with the fact that using Shortcuts often means never opening their app at all. If Apple can’t get everyone on board with App Intents, it’ll have to hope its AI models can figure out various APIs, URL schemes, and other ways of using apps on a user’s behalf. This is the eternal problem of agentic AI, of course, and Apple’s going to experience it in its own proprietary way.

Apple’s other new vibe-coding platform should be a little more straightforward. In addition to using AI to automatically organize and categorize Safari tabs, the new operating systems now allow you to create browser extensions in a similarly natural-language way. Just type “copy the page as a Markdown link,” and, poof, extension created. The simple things I’ve tried have worked so far and are extremely easy to create. They don’t seem to be able to use AI or interact with other apps, though, so the most ambitious thing you can really do is redesign websites. Like with Shortcuts, though, the principle is clear: This is a way to mold your devices the way you want them, without having to build them from scratch.

Apple spent a lot of WWDC describing the tools it made to help people (and kids in particular) use their devices a little less, and one great way to accomplish that is to make it easier to actually do the things we do on our phones. We all have the tasks we do over and over, our own particular smartphone idiosyncrasies. We’ve spent two decades opening and closing apps, swiping and tapping, copying and pasting, navigating between things that have no knowledge of each other. Now, the AI industry is desperately trying to build a better way, a new platform where all you have to do is ask and things get done. They’re all desperately trying to build super apps that become your default digital home for everything.

Apple already has that. It’s called the iPhone. If Apple can make all this stuff actually work — and make no mistake, that’s still a very big if — it has an opportunity to to use all this new tech not to reinvent everything but to just make everything a little easier.