asked codex to make an apple shortcut to open google maps places in organic maps. it struggled for 3 hours.

besides google being increasingly hostile and not easily giving you coordinates, sometimes you can only copy a short plus code (which are ambiguous and unsupported) or even just a search query (which might resolve differently or not at all). moreover, the shortened share link contains no useful information and you need to hit google servers to actually expand it. i think that’s one of the reasons it’s not properly supported.

eventually it solved all this, but seeing it navigate apple shortcuts visual programming was painful. im sure it could’ve written a few lines of codes in under a minute, but there is no such option and instead you need to boil the entire ocean to get through the “simplified” ui. this is horrible and should be retired in favor of ai writing the shortcut from a natural language ask.

in the end i gave up on the initial brief and pivoted to a cloudflare worker that resolves all share links to exact coordinates and a two line shortcut. worked perfectly and took just 5 mins.