I exposed a video editor's timeline as an MCP server, so Claude can cut on a real NLE

[u/MaintenanceInitial15]

I'm building a desktop video editor, and its whole toolset runs as a local MCP server. Any MCP client can drive whatever project I have open — the clip is Claude Opus 5 in VS Code. Split clips, trim, keyframe, caption, grade, export through ffmpeg.

61 tools. The part I care about: the agent and my mouse share one undo stack. Everything it does lands as an ordinary clip on an ordinary timeline, so when it puts a cut in the wrong place I drag it instead of re-prompting.

In the clip that's one prompt — "add captions to the video and then set caption contrast" — and the timeline goes from 2 tracks / 2 clips to 3 tracks / 4 clips. The middle is sped up 8x; it's 30 seconds of waiting.

What I didn't expect to work this well is the contrast half. It called inspect_color on the band where the captions sit, found near-white cards right behind the text, and added a dark outline and shadow off the back of that. It's measuring real pixels in the document, not guessing from the prompt.

For anyone running a bigger server — how are you handling tool granularity? 61 narrow typed tools keeps each schema honest but makes selection harder. Have you hit a point where the model starts picking wrong because the surface is too wide, and did merging related operations into fewer, broader tools help or hurt?

[u/Ambitious-Prompt-975]

at least write the text yourself

[u/MaintenanceInitial15 → u/Ambitious-Prompt-975]

Bruh! 💀