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Hey friend,
You already know Shortcuts. You probably have a few running right now. So I will skip the intro and tell you what actually changed.
In iOS 26, Shortcuts picked up an action called Use Model. Most coverage filed it under "neat, AI summarizes your weather." That misses the entire point.
Use Model drops Apple's on-device foundation model, the same one that powers Apple Intelligence, into the middle of any automation. Set the engine to On-Device, and here is what you are actually holding:
An LLM that runs with the network off. Airplane mode, flight, dead zone, does not matter.
No account. No API key. No ChatGPT login.
No rate limit and no per-call cost. Run it 300 times a day. Apple does not care.
Nothing leaves the phone. The text never touches a server.
Shortcuts is now a local AI scripting environment, and almost nobody treats it as such.
The real unlock is structured output
Stop thinking of Use Model as a chatbot. Use it as a processor that sits between two other actions.
Tell it to return a specific format, and it becomes a logic gate. Prompt it for "one word: urgent, later, or ignore" and you can branch the rest of your automation on the answer. Ask for JSON and pipe it into the next step. Ask for three bullets and drop them into Notes. The output auto-optimizes for whatever action you hand it to next.
A shortcut worth building tonight
New shortcut, set it to show in the Share Sheet, and accept text
Add Use Model, choose On-Device
Prompt: "Pull every action item and any dates from this text. Return a short checklist. No preamble."
Pipe the result into Add New Reminder, or into Show Content if you just want to read it
Now highlight any wall of text, a brief, an email, a pile of notes, share it, and you get a clean action list back. Offline, free, private, three seconds.
The flex, if you live on a Mac
macOS Tahoe finally brought real Automations to Shortcuts, including Folder automations that fire the moment a file lands in a folder.
Chain that with Use Model, and you have an unattended local pipeline. Drop a PDF into a "To Sort" folder; the shortcut reads it, summarizes it, renames the file to reflect its actual contents, and moves it. You touch nothing, and nothing goes to the cloud.
One honest caveat, because you will hit it
The on-device model is small. It is excellent at transforming, extracting, classifying, and summarizing text you give it. It is not built for trivia or long reasoning. When you need more, switch the same action to Private Cloud Compute for real horsepower inside Apple's privacy wall, or to ChatGPT if you are fine leaving it. Match the engine to the job, and you will not be disappointed.
Requires Apple Intelligence, so iPhone 15 Pro and newer.
Go build the triage shortcut. Then hit reply and tell me what you automated. I am collecting the good ones.
See you Friday, Raja
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