I’m not entirely happy with my writing tools setup on my various devices. I’m looking at Ulysses as an alternative, again. I’ve got some old shortcuts for posting to Daystream directly from the app. Do they still work?

Yep, my Ulysses to Daystream shortcuts work perfectly, right out of the box. I’ve got some ideas for improvement, though, so I’m working on those now.

I used Google to search for some help with Ulysses actions in the iOS Shortcuts app. I wanted to add a “move sheet” action to my existing Daystream shortcuts, basically to move a sheet to an archive group after a shortcut publishes the sheet to Daystream.

I searched for “ulysses app shortcut action move sheet to another collection” and got a decent list of search results back. Google offered the following “AI Summary” at the top of those results:

To create a shortcut action in the Ulysses app to move a sheet to another collection, you would use the "Move Sheet" action, selecting the desired sheet and then choosing the target collection from the list of available options within the shortcut editor.

Wow. No need to wade through the search results. This is exactly the information I needed. AI for the win, right?

Well, as Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast my friend!”

Ulysses does not provide a “Move Sheet” action to the Shortcuts app. In fact, the lack of such a sheet is the reason I went to Google in the first place. It’s the obvious solution to the problem I’m trying to address; my first thought was to look for exactly that action within the Shortcuts app. It’s not there and, to my knowledge, has never been a part of the Shortcuts package provided by Ulysses.

So I did some more poking around and found some documentation on the Ulysses x-callback-URL scheme, which does include a move action. I constructed the URL I needed and added an Open X-Callback-URL action to my shortcut and, viola! Works perfectly.

So, AI for the win? No, to the contrary, this is a total fail. It appears to have hallucinated into existence a Shortcut action that just isn’t there. And, as if that’s bad enough, it completely missed the actual solution that clearly does exist and is available on the web. Granted, my search as focused on Shortcut actions, but, AI is supposed to be smart, right? I’d think it might expand the scope of my query when it’s clear the requested action doesn’t exist.

I guess it’s just easier to hallucinate.