March 30, 2026
Cherry-picked comment chaos
Cherri – programming language that compiles directly to a Apple Shortuct
Power-up for Apple Shortcuts or just dessert? Fans cheer, skeptics ask why not Jelly
TLDR: Cherri lets people write code that compiles into Apple Shortcuts, promising easier, bigger automations. Commenters split between real-world fans citing 200 working Shortcuts and skeptics asking how it differs from Jelly or Scriptable, with extra worry about Apple’s signing step—and one hilarious GitHub Actions tangent
Cherri just dropped as a way to write normal code that turns into Apple Shortcuts—and the comments went full rollercoaster. On paper, it’s a win: desktop tools, a package manager, smaller Shortcut files, and easier debugging. But the crowd immediately split: is this a pro power-up or another wheel reinvented? User threecheese fired the opening shot, wondering if it’s basically Jelly or Scriptable with lipstick, and hinting they’d hand it to Claude to escape Shortcuts’ “terrible” building experience. The vibe: curious, but side-eye.
Then came the flex. Power user alin23 said they used Cherri to “build 200 Shortcuts” for a Mac automation app because only Shortcuts can flip Focus Mode, toggle Accessibility features like Color Filters, and even touch Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. Bonus drama fuel: “Claude learned the language fast.” Suddenly, the skeptics paused.
Meanwhile, real-world pain bubbled up: hmartin begged for clarity on signing—the Apple-y process that makes Shortcuts shareable—saying it’s the biggest blocker. Cherri claims it signs on macOS and can fall back to servers, but folks want the hand-holding guide. And for spice, simquat asked the existential “why compile to Shortcuts?” while plugging their opposite-direction tool Breadboards. Cue a hilarious derail when aaronbrethorst barged in asking for Terraform-for-GitHub-Actions—wrong room, right energy.
Verdict: half the thread yells “finally, real tools,” the other half says “show me the difference.” Either way, Cherri just cherry‑picked the spotlight
Key Points
- •Cherri is a programming language that compiles directly into valid Apple Shortcuts for building large, maintainable Shortcut projects.
- •It offers desktop-based development via CLI, a VS Code extension, and a macOS app, with a 1:1 mapping to Shortcut actions to aid debugging.
- •Features include a built-in Git-based package manager, a type system with inference, scoped functions, and tools like raw actions, VCard generation, and base64 embedding.
- •Installation is available through Homebrew and Nix, with development aided by nix-direnv; signing uses macOS by default with fallbacks to HubSign or a shortcut-signing server.
- •Cherri is inspired by Go, Ruby, ScPL, Buttermilk, and Jelly, is partly bootstrapped, and the project began on October 5, 2022.