I've been editing video for over twelve years, across brand, broadcast and social. For my Pussyfootin' A.I. series I don't open an editing app at all. I record one take on my phone, and Claude Code runs the whole edit. This post is the behind-the-scenes version: every tool, what each one does, and the part that actually makes it better every week.
What happens between my phone and your feed
I record one take on my iPhone, pauses and mistakes included, and AirDrop it to my Mac. From there, Claude Code runs the edit with scripts we built together over the series:
- Whisper turns my voice into text, word by word, with a timestamp on every word. That is what lets Claude find the dead air and cut it. This episode's take was 77 seconds raw and 52 seconds after the dead air came out.
- Auphonic cleans up my voice: it evens out the levels and takes the room noise down.
- Apple Vision cuts me out of my background, frame by frame, and Claude composites me inside the screen of a desktop monitor. It keeps the mic I'm holding, which a plain "remove person" cutout used to blur away.
- Captions land on my words, because they are timed from Whisper's word timestamps, not typed in by hand.
- ffmpeg mixes it all: a new song from my library every episode, new sound effects, the music ducked under my voice, then the loudness set so it plays at the same level as everything else in the feed.
- Gemini reviews the finished cut, picture and sound together, like an outside editor would.
Everything on the monitor behind me in this episode is real: the waveform of this take, the word list Whisper made from it, the dead air collapsing, the cutout mask, the song list. Claude built the screen out of the edit itself.
The rulebook is the part that matters
The tools are the easy part. What makes the edit better every time is a rulebook.
Every note I've ever given on this series is written down as a rule. When I said "the sound effects sound a little loud and you seemed to reuse the same sound effects," that became a rule: new sound effects every episode, set by measurement, not by feel. There is now a ledger of every sound and song already used, and a check that fails the cut if one comes back. The rulebook has more than thirty numbered rules now, and a script checks the cut against the ones a machine can measure: size, frame rate, loudness, how much the picture moves, whether the text sits where LinkedIn's buttons won't cover it.
Then Gemini reviews the cut, and Claude checks each finding before acting on it. On this episode Gemini caught that the white tool-name tags sat under LinkedIn's bottom bar in the close-up shots. It was right, so Claude moved them before I ever saw the cut. Whatever the checks catch gets fixed before it reaches me.
That is the whole trick, and it works in any job, not just editing: write your notes down as rules. A note you give once and forget gets given again next week. A note written as a rule gets checked every time.
Four free self-critique skills
The skills are the other half. A skill is a set of written instructions Claude Code loads when a task matches it. These four are the self-critique loop I use so the work gets better over time instead of repeating the same mistakes:
- ship-check: a checklist Claude runs before it calls anything done. It checks the finished thing the way you will receive it (the rendered file, the live page), not just the parts it last touched.
- reviewer-ledger: logs every accept or reject with the reason, so the next review holds the same bar you held last time instead of drifting.
- builder-brief: a short list of traps every builder reads before it starts, so a lesson learned once stays learned.
- false-alarm-registry: things that look broken but aren't, so reviewers stop re-flagging them. Every entry carries the check that proves it's still fine, so it never turns into "stop looking."
Download the four skills (zip, 16 KB)
To install, unzip and copy the four folders into ~/.claude/skills/, or open Claude Code in the unzipped folder and ask it to "install these four folders as personal skills." Start a new session and Claude picks each one up when your request matches it. The examples inside come from a 3D house model; swap in your own. They earn their keep after a few weeks, once the ledger and the brief are full of your notes instead of mine.
Two honest notes
- I still direct. Claude runs the edit, but I watch every cut and give notes. On this episode my one note was the opening line on screen: it said "CLAUDE" and it should have said "CLAUDE DID THIS!" That note went in, and the rule behind it went into the rulebook.
- The tools make mistakes, which is why the checks exist. Whisper hears "Auphonic" as "Althonic" unless you hand it the tool names first. Gemini's findings are leads, not verdicts, and plenty of them turn out to be wrong once they're measured. None of this is one button. It is a pipeline with a rulebook, built one note at a time.
Follow along
Which part would you hand off first? Tell me on LinkedIn, where Pussyfootin' A.I. posts three times a week. Short clips of real things I do with AI, and the whole recipe given away free.