AirTags Work as an NFC Trigger for Apple Shortcuts

cool, now you can play a sad song for those who find your airtag. 'i once was lost but now i'm found'.

No you can't. The user who finds the tag would have to have the automation already set up in their shortcuts app for that to work.

cool, now you can play a sad song for those who find your airtag. 'i once was lost but now i'm found'.

I've been waiting for a device like this for forever, however, I am not sure if what I am looking for is still achievable. I want to be able to walk in a room and have the lights come on and then go off when I leave based on my phone/watch proximity to such device (ie. air tag)

Yes, I know about occupancy sensors but they are based on motion. So either you set ridiculously long times or you risk having the lights shut off when you are just sitting on the couch.

If you want an OCCUPANCY sensor, as opposed to a MOTION sensor, the most reliable solution I have found is Hiome.
https://www.hiome.com

I've been using them for over a year now, and while the first few months were a little rocky (occasionally missed my entering or leaving a room) I guess they (silently, I never had to do anything) updated the firmware because now they are very reliable.
They appear as HomeKit Occupancy sensors, and I use them for exactly what you want. Basically my home setup is
- some lights go on in the afternoon (based on a Hue light sensor)
- all lights come on an hour before sunset (but many of them to 30%)
- when I walk into a room the 30% goes to 100%
- when I leave a room a timer starts and, after 3 minutes, they revert to 30%

To get this fancy you also need Homebridge (to provide HomeKit timers and HomeKit state variables). But for the basic concept you want, the room OCCUPANCY [without having to wave your hands every fifteen minutes]) I've been very happy with Hiome.

"As Shortcuts are completely user-configurable, and can be used to initiate an almost infinite number of actions,"

Clearly written by someone who's never actually tried to do anything serious with Shortcuts.

A more accurate version might be:
"As Shortcuts tend to fail to launch about half the time, and there's not much you can do with them even when they do work, this is not an especially useful new feature".

No you can't. The user who finds the tag would have to have the automation already set up in their shortcuts app for that to work.

You can share the shortcut to your own url, put the url in the AirTag (hardware hack needed) hope the user who finds the url has the option to run downloaded shortcuts. Include the download action of the sound in the shortcut.

I’m trying to convince myself to get an AirTag to try out. I’m familiar with NFC triggers using far cheaper NFC tags. What’s an example of using an AirTag for this scenario?

The scenario that I'm now considering is placing it on a backpack and having a shortcut to trigger that turns off my lights / HomeKit stuff, switches off the WiFi on my phone, and enables Noise Cancelling on my AirPods.

I know that all of that can be done with a cheaper NFC tag, but adding the ability to locate my backpack is ideal.