Riel St. Amand
OpenReel

active

OpenReel

An open-source, Windows-native video editor written in Rust that is, at its core, an agentic harness. Type an edit in the chat panel and the agent CLI you already pay for — Claude Code or Codex — makes the cuts on your timeline. Ctrl+Z reverses the robot.

Repository
  • Rust
  • video
  • agents
  • Windows
  • MCP
  • open source

OpenReel is a native Windows video editor I'm building in Rust. The editor works end to end — import, cut, composite, export — but the point of it is the agent. Type "cut the first three seconds and tighten the pauses" into the chat panel, and the agent CLI already on your machine makes the edits on your timeline, using the same operations you'd use by hand. Every agent edit lands on the same undo stack as yours. Ctrl+Z reverses the robot.

It is not a video generator. Models never create footage here. They edit footage you shot. OpenReel drives Claude Code or Codex CLI as a local subprocess over MCP, with no API keys, no account, and no server. The CLI handles auth; OpenReel never sees a credential. Human and agent share one operation set, so the agent can do exactly what you can do, nothing more, and everything is undoable. Local Whisper transcription gives the agent word-level timestamps, so "remove the filler words" becomes a set of frame-accurate cuts.

The architecture is four crates behind two trait boundaries: a pure-logic core for the document and undo, a media crate for FFmpeg and wgpu compositing, an agent crate that generates tools from the operation set, and an egui app. Early development, GPLv3, no paid tier and no telemetry. The repo is at github.com/CanadaApollo6/OpenReel.