Understanding the tools of the future.
The Idea
I build tools for After Effects. Panels, extensions, automation.
All of them require designing a UI, writing the logic, shipping and maintaining the code.
I wanted to test a completely different approach: what if there was no tool at all? No panel. No buttons. No build. Just an AI agent in a terminal, talking directly to After Effects.
How It Works
- Put together a set of Claude Code skills that teach the LLM how After Effects scripting works and how to connect to it.
- Opened a terminal. Opened After Effects. That was the setup..
- From the terminal I prompted Claude Code with real production tasks: organise layers, rename compositions, find-and-replace across text layers.
- Claude Code generated ExtendScript on the fly, executed it inside AE, and the project updated in real time. Every action wrapped in an undo group so nothing was destructive.
- No extension was built. No panel was installed inside AE. The AI reads the project, writes the code, and runs it from outside the application.
What I Learned
It works. The setup took minutes. The barrier to entry was almost nothing.
It's not replacing well-designed tools any time soon, but it raises real questions about where creative tooling is heading.
I wanted to be someone already testing that, not reading about it later.