Drift
A free desktop video editor with an MCP server, so an agent can work the timeline beside you.
Video work has moved in three steps: editing every cut by hand, then generating clips from a prompt, and now — the interesting one — an agent operating the editing program itself. Drift is the third. It’s an ordinary GPL-3.0 desktop editor built on Qt 6 and FFmpeg, with a built-in MCP server that lets Claude Code, Cursor, or any compatible agent edit the project you have open.
No account, no watermark, no subscription. Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android.
Install
flatpak install flathub org.cutwire.Drift
AppImage, a Windows installer and portable zip, an Apple Silicon .dmg, and Android APKs
are all on the releases page.
The macOS build is signed ad-hoc rather than notarised, so the first launch needs
right-click → Open:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Drift.app
Fonts, stickers, extra effects, and speech models aren’t bundled — pull only the packs you need from the Addon Manager in the header.
As an editor
A real multi-track timeline (trim, split, snap, ripple, undo), GPU effects and transitions, titles and stickers on canvas, auto captions you can correct, subject cutouts and green screen, speed ramps and beat-synced cuts, an audio chain with EQ, compression and noise cleanup, multicam, and project bundles that move media along with the edit. Export is MP4 with presets, GIF, or a ranged In/Out export — and the preview is the compositor, so what you signed off on is what you get.
That’s a complete editor before any of the AI part. Which matters: an agent hook on a weak editor just automates a weak editor.
Agent access
Turn it on in Settings → Agent access. It’s off at every launch, and it listens only on your own machine; the bearer token rotates each session.
The agent doesn’t get a chat box bolted to a web page — it gets the project. It can import media, place and trim clips, change effects, capture a still to check its own work, and export. Every edit lands in the undo stack, which is the safety net that makes this tolerable at all.
How the agent sees it
| Call | What it does |
|---|---|
catalog | Lists the toolboxes and when to use each op |
toolbox({name}) | Full JSON schemas for that toolbox |
apply({ops:[…]}) | Runs mutations in order — one undo step for the whole batch |
inspect({clips:true}) | Project state: clip UUIDs, effects, transitions, subtitles, jobs |
capture() | A JPEG still of the composition, to verify the edit |
Attaching to a running editor without putting a token in a config file:
{
"mcpServers": {
"drift": {
"command": "/path/to/drift",
"args": ["--mcp-stdio"]
}
}
}
If the editor is closed or Agent access is off, calls return a JSON-RPC error and the bridge stays up — flipping the setting is enough, no client restart.
Headless, on a server
drift --headless # MCP on stdin/stdout
drift --headless --mcp-port 4731 # MCP over HTTP
No window, no open project, no session token needed. One catch worth knowing before you
debug it at midnight: rendering needs an OpenGL 3.3 context, which is not the same as
needing a window. On a Linux box with no /dev/dri:
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb xvfb-run -a drift --headless
Without a usable context it still serves MCP and still edits projects — only render, capture, and export fail.
Two ways to let an agent make video
| Drift | HyperFrames / Remotion | |
|---|---|---|
| The video is | A project file in an editor | Source code in your repository |
| The agent | Operates the timeline | Writes the composition |
| Review | Watch it, scrub it, undo it | Read the diff |
| Fits | Footage you shot, edited once | Templated video regenerated on every release |
They’re not competitors. One is for the edit you’d otherwise do by hand; the other is for video that should rebuild itself.
Worth knowing
- It’s young. v0.5.x, and moving fast. Keep projects backed up as bundles and don’t put an unmissable deadline on a release you installed yesterday.
- Agent access is off by default, and that’s the right default. Turn it on for the session you want it, not permanently.
- An agent is fast at the tedious half — importing, syncing, applying the same treatment to forty clips, generating captions. Taste in the cut is still yours.
Next
The same idea for stills, down to a 500+ command registry an agent can drive → PhotoCraft
Last updated 07 Sep 2026, 00:00 UTC.