Drafts as Hub: How AI Helped Me Connect Five Apps on iPad (Part 2)
I'm not a developer. I just have five apps that need to talk to each other and an AI that writes JavaScript.
I’m not a developer. If you read Part 1, you already know this. If you didn’t, go read it first because this is where things get technical and I need you to understand that everything I’m about to walk through was built by describing what I wanted to an AI and testing until it worked.
Part 1 covered why I use five apps, why Drafts became the hub connecting them, and what my daily flow looks like from 6:15am to the first of each month. This part digs into the engine - the Daily Log, Weekly Note, and Monthly Note actions that do the actual routing. These three actions are the backbone of the entire system, and they all share a pattern I stumbled into that made building each one easier than the last.
The Core Problem
Every one of these actions solves the same fundamental problem: I type something in Drafts on my iPad, and it needs to end up in Notion, Obsidian, and Apple Notes without me opening any of those apps. Each of those destinations has a different way of getting data in. Notion has a proper API. Obsidian doesn’t have an API on iPad, but a third-party app called Actions for Obsidian lets Apple Shortcuts write to your vault. Apple Notes has no API at all - the only automated path in is through Shortcuts.
So every action I built follows the same three-step structure. First, a JavaScript script runs inside Drafts that formats the content and handles the Notion API call directly. Second, that script passes formatted content to an Apple Shortcut using Drafts’ template tag system. Third, the Shortcut handles Obsidian and Apple Notes since those require the Shortcuts bridge to receive data.
That’s the architecture. JavaScript for Notion, Shortcuts for everything else, and template tags as the glue between them.
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers. If you’re building something similar or want to understand how the Notion API integration, the Shortcuts bridge pattern, and the reusable section picker UI actually work, subscribe to get the full breakdown.
