IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

Key Themes from the discussion

  • A need for a better cross‑platform automation tool
    “I’m interested to understand how this is different than Jelly; they seem to be similar. Same for Scriptable. I’ve been looking at this to hand over to Claude to build Shortcuts, something which has a terrible development experience.” – threecheese

  • Signing infrastructure is critical for cross‑platform viability
    “From the repo, it signs natively on macOS and falls back to a cloud signing server (shortcut-signing-server). That fallback matters -- without macOS you would have to reverse‑engineer Apple signing format yourself, and it changes across iOS versions. The hosted signing server is really what makes the whole cross‑platform toolchain viable.” – yg1112

  • Desire for a Terraform‑like syntax for CI configuration “Adjacently, does anyone know of a Terraform-like syntax for creating GitHub Actions YML files?” – aaronbrethorst

🚀 Project Ideas

Generating project ideas…

Acton - Terraform-like DSLfor GitHub Actions

Summary

  • A declarative, human‑readable syntax that compiles to standard GitHub Actions YML, solving the manual YAML editing pain.
  • Eliminates friction for CI/CD creators by providing a Terraform‑like DSL, boosting productivity and reducing errors.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience DevOps engineers, CI/CD pipeline creators, GitHub Actions users
Core Feature Declarative, human‑readable syntax that compiles to standard GitHub Actions YML
Tech Stack Rust backend, Node.js CLI, Web UI, JSON schema validation
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: Tiered usage‑based pricing (free tier up to 100 builds/month, paid at $0.01 per additional build)

Notes

  • Hacker News users explicitly asked for a Terraform‑like syntax for GitHub Actions YML files, indicating strong demand.
  • Provides a clear migration path from manual YAML to a higher‑level DSL, improving productivity and reducing errors.

SwiftSigner - Cloud-native signing service for iOS/macOS Shortcuts

Summary- A serverless signing backend that handles Apple developer certificate signing for Shortcuts, eliminating the need for local macOS signing setup.

  • Removes the friction described by yg1112 about fallback signing servers and reverse‑engineering signing formats.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience iOS/macOS developers, automation engineers, hobbyists building cross‑platform shortcuts
Core Feature On‑demand signing API that accepts .shortcut files and returns signed packages, with optional self‑hosted signing node
Tech Stack Go microservice, AWS Lambda, S3 storage, Apple Developer API integration
Difficulty Low
Monetization Revenue-ready: Subscription per million signed files (e.g., $5/mo for up to 10k signatures, $0.001 per extra)

Notes

  • Commenters like yg1112 highlighted the importance of a hosted signing server to avoid reverse‑engineering Apple's format.
  • Solves the signing setup blocker that held back many from deeper Shortcuts work, offering a ready‑made SaaS solution.

MonacoScript - Unified scripting framework that compiles AI‑generated scripts into native shortcuts, automator, and shell actions

Summary

  • A cross‑platform scripting language that can be authored in any editor and transpiled to iOS Shortcuts, macOS Automator, and Unix shell scripts.
  • Enables seamless hand‑off to AI assistants like Claude for rapid CI/CD or automation prototyping.

Details| Key | Value |

|-----|-------| | Target Audience | AI‑driven developers, power users, automation hobbyists, CI/CD pipelines | | Core Feature | Syntax similar to Python/JS, one‑click compiler that outputs platform‑specific action bundles | | Tech Stack | TypeScript front‑end, Rust compiler backend, Dockerized CLI, VS Code extension | | Difficulty | Medium | | Monetization | Revenue-ready: Freemium with paid plan for private model integration and higher output limits |

Notes- Hacker News discussion about handing over to Claude to build Shortcuts points to a need for better scripting ergonomics and AI‑friendly workflows.

  • Creates a bridge between modern AI assistants and native automation tools, turning the ‘terrible development experience’ into a smooth pipeline.

Read Later