Understanding the tools of the future.
Prompting Adobe
The Idea
I've spent years building After Effects tools. Each one needs a UI, logic, documentation and maintenance.
The tradeoff for anything shipped to the mass market is always the same: keep it vague enough to work for everyone, or build enough settings that people can bend it to their workflow. Neither is perfect. Most people will cobble together their own solution before spending time learning someone else's tool.
I wanted to test a different model entirely. No panel. No extension. No build at all. Just Claude Code in a terminal, connected to After Effects, doing the work when asked.
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
The non-technical reaction says it best: "Wait, you just asked Claude and it did things in After Effects for you?"
That's exactly what happened. Real production tasks. Housekeeping work: renaming layers, sorting compositions, filing projects. Methodical, time-consuming, needs no creative judgment. Prompted in plain language. Done without touching After Effects directly.
It's not replacing well-designed tools any time soon. But if you can describe what you need in a terminal and watch After Effects respond, the question of what the next generation of tooling looks like becomes harder to ignore. Claude already integrates with Blender. The direction is clear.
I wanted to be the person already testing that, not reading about it later.
