An AI Video Editor That Edits For You: Testing Palmier Instead of Hiring an Editor

Palmier is a free, open source Mac video editor where an AI agent edits your timeline on command, so a solo creator can ship videos without hiring an editor.

It is 1am and you are still in the timeline. Cutting the dead air. Lining up the clips. Dropping in the b roll. Editing is the one job you could never really hand off, because handing it off meant hiring an editor, and a good editor is expensive, slow to find, and one more person to manage. So you keep doing it yourself, at night, after the actual work is done.

That just changed. There is now a video editor where you do not push the clips around at all. You tell an AI what you want, and it does the edit for you.

What Palmier is

Palmier is a free, open source video editor for the Mac with an AI agent living inside it. Think of it like CapCut, except a robot editor sits on the timeline with you. The editor itself is free to download and use, with no login. It is the same kind of tool you already edit in, with one difference: you can talk to it.

How it actually works

The trick is a small connector called an MCP, the same kind of plug Claude already uses to reach your other tools. Palmier exposes its timeline through that plug, so an AI agent can read your project and make real edits on it.

In plain terms, you type what you want and it happens:

• Trim the dead air out of this section.
• Reorder these three clips.
• Cut this down to fifteen seconds.
• Make a short b roll clip of a steak and drop it on the timeline.

You describe the edit in normal words. The AI performs it. You watch it land, and you approve. You are directing instead of dragging.

What is free and what costs money

This part matters, so here it is straight. The editor and all the editing the AI does for you, the trims, the reordering, the arranging, are free forever. You only pay when you ask it to generate brand new AI footage from scratch, like that steak clip, which runs on paid models. The honest catch: it needs a current Mac, and you cannot plug in your own AI keys yet.

Why this is bigger than a new app

Strip away the tool and look at the move underneath it. The repeatable part of editing, the cutting and arranging that eats your nights, is exactly the kind of busywork a system is best at. For years the only way to offload it was to hire an editor. Now an AI system can do the busywork on command, so you can ship without adding payroll.

This is not about replacing your editor or your team. A person still wins on story, taste, and judgment, the things that make the work yours. This is about a busy creator buying back their own time, so the cutting and lining up stops stealing the hours you should be spending on the parts only you can do.

The promise is working less, not doing more

The point is not to crank out twice as much content. It is to ship the same work in a fraction of the time, with no new hire to find and manage. You get your nights back. That is what an AI system instead of hiring an employee actually looks like, applied to the one job you thought you were stuck doing forever.

I am testing Palmier on real work right now. If you want to know how it holds up, or you want one of these systems pointed at the busywork in your own business, that is exactly what I build.