Samarth Saxena has launched ROUGH//CUT, a local, in-browser video editor that lets people edit alongside an AI agent, he said in a post on X. The app exposes 40 WebMCP tools, placing the agent and editor on the same timeline and command layer, according to project documentation.
The launch enters a 2026 market where Adobe Premiere, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro have added AI features, while AI-native tools include Descript, CapCut, VEED and Opus Clip. Saxena says he built ROUGH//CUT after more than five years of professional video editing because existing AI editors can take too much control from the person making the video.
ROUGH//CUT is "a human-first video editor built for working with AI," according to its Product Hunt tagline. The project is designed to keep creative decisions with the editor while assigning repetitive tasks to AI.
The editor supports non-destructive edits and full undo, along with a multi-lane timeline synchronized with video preview and transcript. It includes silence detection and clip manipulation, and can export 1080p H.264 MP4 files, EDL files or SRT files.
For transcription, ROUGH//CUT uses Whisper Large V3 Turbo for real-time word-level timestamps and offers optional cloud transcription. OpenAI API keys are session-only by default; users can choose to keep them in browser storage, while the project says keys are never retained server-side.
The codebase is available under the MIT License. It uses Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS on the frontend, with Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2 and Workers AI for backend and cloud infrastructure. WebMCP, an emerging open web standard, lets websites expose structured tools directly to in-browser AI agents, with client-side operation rather than a client-server architecture.
