I'll get the disclaimer out of the way first: I'm not a creator. I've never run a channel, never kept a posting schedule, never learned what a J-cut is the proper way. I'm a software engineer. The closest thing I have to an audience is a personal page that almost nobody visits.
Which is exactly where this started. One weekend I decided the handful of videos on that page looked amateur, because they were, and that I'd fix them myself. How hard could it be.
Ahmad Fozooni, founder of ReelM
The thing I couldn't unsee
Editing wasn't hard, exactly. It was manual in a way I'd forgotten software could still be.
Here's the context that ruined me for it. All day, I write code next to an AI agent. I describe what I want in plain English, "pull the auth logic into its own module, update the callers, run the tests," and it plans the steps, runs the tools, checks its own work, and hands me back a diff. I stay the one making decisions; it does the labor. After a couple of years of working that way, it stops feeling like magic and starts feeling like the floor.
Then I opened a video editor and the floor was gone. To cut one dead pause I had to scrub the waveform, find the gap by eye, drop two markers, delete, close the space, and start again on the next one. I timed a session once: roughly forty minutes to turn ninety raw seconds into something watchable. Every idea I had (tighten this, caption that, it feels flat) had to be hand-translated into fifty tiny mechanical moves, and every move was a chance to lose the thread.
So I did what engineers do. I tried to script my way out: a pile of ffmpeg
commands and a transcript parser to strip the silences automatically. It worked
beautifully once, on one video, then fell apart on the next one with different
pacing. I didn't want a script. I wanted the thing I already had for code, an
agent that knew the craft and that I could just talk to.
So I went looking for it
I assumed it already existed. Someone had surely built Claude Code for editors. I spent a few weeks convinced I just hadn't found it yet.
What I found was impressive, and scattered across a dozen apps. One tool that writes captions better than anything I'd seen. Another that dubs your voice into a dozen languages. A whole shelf of AI plugins for Premiere and DaVinci, each doing one clever thing well. But that was the pattern: each did a single trick. None of them planned. None of them talked to each other. You bought captions from here, dubbing from there, a highlight-finder from somewhere else, paid three subscriptions for the privilege, and still landed back in the timeline stitching their outputs together by hand. The exact manual work I was trying to get away from.
There was plenty of AI in the editor. None of it was the editor. Point solutions wearing an AI badge: narrow, disconnected, priced one trick at a time. Nobody had built the part that mattered, a single agent you could hand "cut this to sixty seconds, caption it in my style, make it cinematic" and trust to work out the sequence and do the whole thing.
The best tool doesn't make you feel powerful. It makes the work disappear so the idea can show up.
So I started building
In the spring of 2026 I stopped looking and started building the thing I couldn't find.
It became ReelMy: an agent, not a feature. It understands your footage, plans an edit, calls the tools, checks its own work, and hands you back a timeline. Not a black box that emits a finished file you're not allowed to touch. Every move it makes is a real, reversible step on a real timeline. You stay the director. It does the ninety-seventh caption pass.
And because I came at this from the developer's side, ReelMy connects to the tools I already trust. You can even drive it from Claude Code, if that's where you live. The studio around it is built to keep up: a render core fast enough that the agent's suggestions land while you're still thinking, not after a coffee break.
That's the whole idea, honestly. I came to editing as an outsider, and the outside view turned out to be the useful part. The creators I'd been watching weren't short on talent or tools. They were drowning in mechanical work that software should have absorbed years ago, the same work my coding agent had quietly taken off my hands. I never made peace with the manual parts, so they never got the chance to look normal to me.
If any of this resonates, download it, break it, and tell me what's missing. I read everything.
— Ahmad
ALL POSTS