Hello! At @descript we are bought in on AI agents - very pleased to announce something we've been working on for awhile: Our agentic video editor - i.e. cursor for video. Sign up to try it out at descript.com/agent

Was listening to the Lenny podcast w/ the Cursor CEO… TL;DR where he sees programming going is that it’ll look more like you’re writing application logic in natural english language instead of code. Struck me that they’re basically operating on the same belief as us at @descript - that “text” (i.e. natural language) is the fastest and most intuitive interface for humans, and what you want is a pairing of an agentic co-editor with a text-based UI for humans when they want to manipulate content directly. They are trying to push programming from code to text. We’re trying to push video editing from timeline to text. They started with the agent and we started with the human editor.

Congratulations to @descript's new CEO, @burkenstocks! And congratulations to me on my new role, executive chairman! If you haven't heard it, “executive” chairman is a title founders give themselves so they can still hang around the office and undermine their successor for a few years until they get listless and put themselves back in the job. That’s a joke - at least in our case! As executive chairman, I won’t be in an operating role or be responsible for making decisions… I’ll just be around a little more than a normal board member - to be a sounding board to Laura, to provide historical context and continuity, to solemnly reflect on why no one actually wants to talk to me, etc. Why the change? The very short answer is that Laura is the better CEO for Descript. The longer answer… We’re at an exciting moment in Descript - $55M in ARR, growing 75% YoY (and accelerating!) - and we’re at the beginning of a transformative shift in the company with the launch of our AI video editing agent. As the company gets to this scale, the nature of the CEO role changes. I’ve been through this before, so it’s not a surprise. And I’ve been transparent that, at some point, it would no longer be the job for me. I can work myself into a state of being excited about the role… but why bother when I’ve got someone on deck who will take to it like a fish to water? Which brings us to Laura. Within weeks of becoming our head of product two years ago, I had Laura marked as my successor. She has these things that never occupy the same body: Incredible product judgment, keen business sense, S-tier communication and leadership skills, deeply principled, courageous, unshakable self-confidence — AND she’s a weirdo (I can’t imagine a better culture carrier than the namer of Underlord). I feel lucky to have had this opportunity to work alongside her and be someone she will mistake for having given her a career opportunity that she would have gotten anyway. So once again, congratulations to Laura - and to Descript! May you win at business with grace and magnanimity! Note: I posted this already on LinkedIn. Is that ok? Did I do it alright? Sorry if you read it in two places, it's exactly the same.

We've been working for the last many months on overhauling visual editing in @descript - really proud of what the team put together, launches today, go try it!

Big @descript launch today - we've redesigned to make space for Underlord, an AI assistant editor that'll do all the tedious parts of editing for you, including fixing mistakes / clarifying your recording, creating viral clips, translation, and a lot more: producthunt.com/posts/underl…

I didn't see this announced, but now when you ask ChatGPT for feedback, it'll leave comments on your canvas - so cool... and feels like something that's certain to be staple of the emerging interaction language for agentic editors

Berkeley/Rockridge residents: @nabeel and I are opening a board game social club by Star Market called Tabletop Library this fall. If you're interested in joining: tabletoplibrary.com @BerkeleyTTL This has been a great side project for experimenting with AI - we talked about that on the How I AI podcast this week: piped.video/watch?v=HuLL6wOE…

We're reimagining @descript around agentic vibe editing - lots of talk about Cursor for Video but nothing is close to the truly open experience you get in Descript, go give it a try!

28 quality of life improvements we shipped in the latest version of @descript: piped.video/watch?v=eabYcZqk…

Cool @descript agent workflow thing - after I finished my edit, I just asked it to create a prompt so I that I can paste into my next video and single shot edit it.

I've found this podcast extremely helpful in getting a peak into a deluge of new AI products that I haven't had time to dig into, and processing their implications

How many product teams out there have a trash bin full of icons they tried for their AI stuff before eventually settling on sparkles?

If you are not a video creator but you are into #thoughtleadership, learning about @descript's new release is #timewellspent

hm probably not good if we are getting complements about this - I just want to be average. @burkenstocks please make canceling harder

Just you wait - it's all part of a long 4d chess move to sell more group coupons

Getting ready to ship a new AI thing in @descript that analyzes edit boundaries so it only makes good cuts when you remove filler words, etc.

I waited forever but sadly had to take matters into my own hands this time

We launched AI avatars in @descript today. If you've seen other AI avatars and felt like "I have know how I could ever put something like this in front of my audience", check out Descript's take. They feel really fun, and they integrate seamlessly into Descript features like layouts so you can work with them like you work with camera recordings / any other video you make in Descript.

Descript users: Here's a video I just put together showing some upcoming editor UX changes. Would love your feedback.

I suspect the "idea guys" we made fun of 10 years ago will still get made fun of 10 years from now. The thing they lack, that AI doesn't necessarily solve, isn't just technical know-how; it's resourcefulness, the ability to "just find a way" to turn ideas into reality. I haven't yet found the word to capture the quality that will define the ruling class in the age of AI... ideas, taste, creativity... they're part of it, but not all of it! blog.samaltman.com/the-gentl…

I've been so lucky to have @nabeel as a VC - founders, can't recommend him more highly piped.video/watch?v=_Qq4p-Ce…

Cool blast from the past - if anyone wants to see what the very first version of @descript looked like. Thanks for sharing @pitdesi!

What does this mean? Is this good?

What do I know, but all those people predicting that AI is going to create a bigger wealth/power gap in the short term, I'd bet on that atm. My sense is that not everyone goes through life with a certain kind of sensitivity to noticing problems, and I think the people who do - whatever that quality is - are going to do incredibly well, while many/most will themselves become agents in a meat sack. 😐

For founders trying to scale, these vibecoding tools feel like being a sober drug addict at burning man - the hardest transition we go through is learning how to stop doing the thing that got us there in the first place - building stuff - and delegating it to our teams. Vibecoding is like mainlining that feeling that we get from buliding.

I've gotten to know Shopify's VP of Core Product @glencoates since he became a @descript customer, and always loved listening to him talk about how they build product/culture over there, so thought I'd record a conversation and share it with you all. piped.video/watch?v=uJ54n0_3…

ok want to do it now?

Andrew L is incredibly talented... come work with him!

I agree with Blake, it's funny how you just wake up one day and find yourself selling internet coupons. "This wasn't part of the plan"...

Andrew is incredibly talented, come work with him!

Would love to hear about it. Want to talk tomorrow?

My 11 year old loves baseball - we've been watching lots of player interviews... and ChatGPT has now confirmed what I feared. Is this the general perception, that baseball players are the dumbest of the athletes?

I think this is maybe true (as far as generalizations go), but I don't think it's any more true for tech and defense people than anyone in any role... people are going to find ways to rationalize their livelihood. The difference w/ tech and startups is that it's all new and evolves so fast that the thing you thought you were building ends up becoming something else... often without you realizing it or doing so intentionally. Just pointing it out because I don't think it helps solve the problem to act like the problem is just a Bad People problem.

This is right, plus @eschadiol

It works on chrome (except recording but that's coming soon) - what's the problem you're running into?

Yeah, I can imagine it's great for a former data scientist, but for a former Filemaker developer like me - someone who now fawns over tools like @coda_hq and @retool , Chartio was perfect :-)

No one is perfect

@TomFrankly hi Thomas... would love to get in touch, can I DM you?

Really appreciate you making this - I'm so proud of the work this team did and it's awesome to see it get noticed. Took a lot of time and hard work to get this voice dialed in!

If you're not doing anything, I'm about to do a live video customer AMA to coincide with @descript's AI avatar release piped.video/watch?v=Y_29wPE1… Now is your chance to ask how to correctly pronounce "Descript" and get an evasive answer!

yeah for sure

ok - yeah since then we've brought the web version on parity with the desktop app, and we don't push people to the app as strongly... so I was just trying to figure out if you'd found some flow that we missed.

I have nothing to do with it - @bcopple and the team he's built here

Well, in this case, we can’t use our screen recorder to record itself - but also, you are right - screen studio is an incredible product. Even though we will be increasingly competitive, nothing but respect and admiration for what you’ve built!

This is the main thing we've been focused on for the last five months (stability, not cashing out) - hopefully you're seeing improvements and you should see a lot more in the coming weeks. But if there are specific bugs that are killing you please let me know

It looks like it's not transcribed - can you right click and there should be an option to transcribe?

we (probably everyone?) use the Nvidia model

I hope this helps move some Descript units piped.video/watch?v=x30z470j… Context: piped.video/watch?v=9g5SGACV…

Can you share a project w/ me and point out where it happens? Not a know issue or anything

yes :-)

Thank you - I will use this tweet to justify some terrible future decisions! :-)

Oh no! Have you gotten any help from the Descript side / figured out what was going on? I can help if you want, either here or email me at andrew@descript.com

what was the hardest thing about the learning curve? If you can put yourself back in that mindset, curious whether there was something specific that just took awhile to click

Will do!

We just launched a quick screen recorder that shares instantly, check it out

What should we build? What's your punchlist for us to be amazing?

Have you tried contacting support? I can make sure they prioritize your case, but it's limited how much I can help you over Twitter. It feels like you should stop trying to use Descript and losing work until we can help you get the issues resolved?

We should be able to iron out those pronunciation kinks pretty quickly

can you hop on a quick zoom and I'll show you?

This is just a UX quirk - if you say that they're not using headphones, it will turn on echo cancellation

Yeah that's definitely confusing

Got it - thanks for the feedback!

I will try to join!

We have a update coming out soon that brings back some of those ideas. Do you want to try it?

Makes sense. Working on it

Have you tried it recently? We shipped a complete rewrite it should be super solid

You shouldn't have scenes if you're using audio compositions - you might have it set as a video composition? you can change here, it's kind of buried - and go into preferences to change the default

Try publish instead of export, it's way faster

Yeah the auto-reframe is limited. We have a center active speaker effect but I think it's more for handling multi speaker situations. Templates are getting a big upgrade in 1st week of Feb Word gaps I agree are unintuitive and hidden but once you know how to deal with them they're pretty fast, try command G to quickly edit a word gap from the script Reprogrammable keybindings probably not coming anytime soon :-(

you can then use scenes and layouts to switch between different saved camera arrangements, similar to OBS

Ah thanks

That's cool - no we don't use Atlassian, we're big @linear fans. Does anyone do that - just use Atlassian for Chartio? Feels wrong...

No voice? I probably wouldn't use Descript. You could definitely make it work but for something like this I don't know that you need it

Yeah, sadly the tabs thing is gonna be a limitation of any browser based recording solution. If you just pull it into its own window and use another Chrome window for your tabs, that will take care of it - you can also try Chrome's "Create Shortcut" feature to create a mini Squadcast app.

We aim to barely frustrate!

You mean text based editing? Have you tried it?

I just signed up!

Cedric wouldn't be Cedric anymore if he was upbeat. But we are adding prompt-based voice creation very soon

No, it's always been there!

Nice of you to say, thanks!

The new version isn't quite ready - there's just some boring architectural reasons why it's a beast of its own to get working with the new version of the desktop app. We made a judgement call that the benefits outweighed the downsides. We're not doing a good job right now at helping people understand where it went.

BUT the cool thing about the agent is that you don't really need to understand that, you just need to be able to describe what you want to the agent

Something that helps a lot is using the keyboard shortcut to open a sequence - command + shift + o on mac. You can get in and out of the sequences pretty quickly from the sequence if you're using the keyboard along w/ the shortcuts for the sequencer / timeline tools

That shouldn't be happening. If you send me a link to your project I can take a look. andrew@descript.com

Implying… you are now the Wilt Chamberlain of voice cloning?

the only advantage the desktop app has is a nicer screen recorder

oh no what happened?

Sorry - you can download it here: descript.com/download/deskto…

The only other thing I can think of doing is you could put the file in a sequence and duplicate it on two tracks. Your layout would then save the positioning/effects on each of the two script layers of the sequence. But to use it, you'd need to setup that double track sequence for every new asset you want to create

Should be fully rolled out now - check in the list of effects?

it's not a gaming reference! It's just what it sounds like

share.descript.com/view/UkJ6… smart transitions

I was just trying this yesterday - lmk what you think

There's something causing it to not work on some computers but if you redownload it you should be ok. Sorry! descript.com/download

sorry, try redownloading the app descript.com/download

No API atm. What would you do with it?

It shows the rendering process in the toast that you see after you click download

When you click on it you'll see a toolbar with a restore button