What is apple-shortcuts?

A guide and generator for Apple Shortcuts, Apple’s automation workflows on macOS and iOS. It creates the XML files that describe shortcuts and can account for integrations with other apps.

Creating, changing, examining, or documenting shortcuts that use Apple actions and supported third-party apps.

It helps turn an automation idea into an importable shortcut while making clear that Apple requires shortcuts to be signed before they can be shared or imported.

apple-shortcuts — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by obeone

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add obeone/claude-skills --skill apple-shortcuts

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/obeone/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/obeone/claude-skills/apple-shortcuts/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/obeone/claude-skills/apple-shortcuts)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/obeone/claude-skills/apple-shortcuts"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/obeone/claude-skills/apple-shortcuts/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/obeone/claude-skills/apple-shortcuts"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/obeone/claude-skills/apple-shortcuts.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 133 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,080 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00133	$0.03080
Opus 5	$0.00067	$0.01540
Sonnet 5	$0.00027	$0.00616
Haiku 4.5	$0.00013	$0.00308

Measured 12d ago against content hash 7fb9cd3ce670, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apple-shortcuts scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 6 executable files (tools/diff-actions.py, tools/find-action-identifier.py, tools/inspect-shortcut.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/apple-shortcuts/SKILL.md · 332 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 332 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Apple Shortcuts

Generate plist XML that the Shortcuts app imports. Targets macOS 12+ and iOS 15+. Use this skill for creation, modification, reverse engineering, and reference lookups.

Critical upfront fact: signing

Since iOS 15 / macOS 12, Shortcuts refuses unsigned files. This skill produces plist XML. Delivery to the user requires one of:

macOS 12+: run shortcuts sign -i in.plist -o out.shortcut -m anyone to produce a distributable .shortcut. The user double-clicks or runs open -a Shortcuts out.shortcut.
macOS, manual route: open the plist in Shortcuts.app (rename to .shortcut first), re-save — Shortcuts re-signs it.
iOS, no signing toolchain: the user must receive a signed .shortcut via iCloud share link (https://www.icloud.com/ shortcuts/...), AirDrop, or Messages. Unsigned plist XML cannot be imported on iOS.

State this cost to the user before generating. If they lack macOS, the deliverable is XML plus instructions; full binary signing without macOS is a rabbit hole this skill does not enter.

See gotchas/signing-and-sharing.md for the full story.

Quickstart (three steps)

1. Identify the action set

If you know the action by name but not its identifier:

./tools/find-action-identifier.py "send message"

If you need to discover an unknown third-party action on macOS:

./tools/list-app-intents.py --bundle com.example.app

If you need the full native action catalog:

./tools/list-native-actions.py

2. Generate the plist

Consult references in this order:

references/plist-format.md for the envelope and top-level keys.
references/variables-and-types.md for magic variable wiring.
references/actions-native-*.md for concrete action schemas.
patterns/*.md if the task matches a known pattern.
templates/*.plist as starting points.

Write the plist as XML. Every action dict must carry at minimum WFWorkflowActionIdentifier and WFWorkflowActionParameters.

Read the full file on GitHub · 332 lines

Files

What ships with it

38 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

12d ago First seen · 332 lines · 133 tokens per session scan A 7fb9cd3ce670

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apple-shortcuts is a skill published in the GitHub repository obeone/claude-skills (3 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 133 tokens to every session and 3,080 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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