iOS shortcuts provide a very cool way to extend the functionalities of an iPhone. You can use them to make any application better and augment its behavior, either on the device itself or on another device entirely.
Shortcuts also provide a “Run Script over SSH” affordance, that when combined with a VPS, allows to do a whole bunch of cool things that would previously require a tailor made app or some third party integrations.
Take this post for instance, it was fully written in the Notes app on iOS and then sent over to the server for processing / publishing by simply “sharing” the note with a Shortcut.
Similarly, I also use shortcuts to coordinate my own barebones bookmarking tool. I just use Safari regularly and share a website with my shortcut, which ends up then nicely appended to my bookmarks.txt on my server.
With this workflow, you’re essentially turning the iPhone into a sort of dumb terminal, only ever used to orchestrate a bunch of functionality on your terms.
The insight is that the heavy lifting can be done somewhere else, all the while using tools that provide a few benefits in terms of UX but a massive leap forward in terms of owning my data.
I also hope that by making it easily accessible and low friction to post, I’ll do more of it.
Conclusion
I reckon that this could be very well combined with LLM functionality without requiring a custom app or even worse, a browser extension. I should try it out.