I haven't played with it yet, but it looks like as long as the thing you want to do has a hotkey you can use this to make touchbar button to do it whenever you are in that particular app.
It's pretty great, actually. You can also set it to run AppleScripts, which can call the shell. I have set up buttons in the touch bar for common tasks such as zipping an archive without .DS_Store crud in Finder, and for AirMail I have a button that creates a folder based on the subject line of the open email thread and saves attachments there. I have no idea how the Touch Bar is supposed to be useful by default, but I'm finding it quite nice with some work.