Figma for Video Editing Lands: Kino Writes the Timeline as Code, Letting Claude Code and Codex Edit Together

Will Depue, when retweeting Kino's launch, gave a blunt assessment: 'figma for video finally here boys.' Luke Igel followed with a joke to the effect of what would happen if Claude Code liked editing. What Kino wants to solve isn't complicated: let agents truly enter the video editing workflow, not just generate a piece of footage.

Launch links: Kino launch tweet, Will Depue's retweet.

Kino's entry point is clear. Drag in footage, get highlights, continue editing, generate a link to send to the team for feedback, and hand the rest to agents. It supports end-to-end video work with Claude Code and Codex. The key is that in Kino every editing decision is code, and a real timeline sits on top of that code. Any decision can be changed manually. This design puts agents' batch-processing capability and human judgment in the same project.

Multiplayer collaboration was a focus at launch. Luke Igel said Kino is multiplayer. When releasing the video, he ran more than five agents editing the timeline simultaneously, while Donald led another group of agents working on a timeline a few minutes later. Donald's agents handled sound design, Luke's agents handled rotoscoping VFX, and the two of them then manually fixed small issues.

Kino's team didn't start from a launch-event demo. Luke Igel said he co-directed an MIT documentary, then later used Kino on shows like Survivor and A24's Beef. The team operated like Palantir forward deployments, frequently flying to Los Angeles to integrate with traditional video editors. At the time, frontier models weren't allowed to be used, and they still couldn't make editors more than 10x faster. In 2025, the team rebuilt Kino as a unified editor, betting on coding as editing.

There's also a very meta use in the launch video. Kino built its own interface mock in Kino, then made a product trailer in the style of a 2009 Mac app. It sounds like showing off, but it demonstrates that once the timeline becomes code, agents can participate in interface demonstrations, footage reassembly, and stylized output.

Trial instructions were also provided. Luke Igel invited people to drag 250GB ProRes clips shot on a new iPhone into Kino, use Kino's prompt plus agents to import old DaVinci projects, install it on ChatGPT desktop and Grok Bot, and then send it to the team. He said all of this had been battle-tested, and he hoped users would try to break it.

For video teams, Kino's selling point isn't an extra AI editing button. It opens up the editing project to agents and code. How far it can go depends on stability in complex projects and whether, after agents modify the timeline, it's actually easier for humans to take over. At least for now, the phrase 'Figma for video' has a concrete product to match it.