AE Assistant
Claude-Powered After Effects Plugin — 2026
Project Type
Self-Initiated Tool
Vibe-Coded Plugin
Year
2026
Built With
- Claude Code
- Claude CLI Integration
- After Effects Scripting
- ExtendScript / CEP
Role
Sole Designer & Developer
Built over several weeks
Result
Hundreds of hours saved
Adopted internally · developed externally
An After Effects plugin that integrates Claude directly into the motion designer's workflow — scripting rigs, building toolkits, automating documentation, and freeing designers to spend hours on creative decisions instead of days on setup.
Motion design at scale is bottlenecked by tedious setup — rig wiring, control-layer naming, render configs, documentation. Creative time gets eaten by assembly time.
The opportunity wasn't a faster designer. It was tooling that compressed the time between idea and rig, so the creative decisions only a designer can make stopped being the part that got squeezed.
A native AE plugin where Claude takes direct action in After Effects — and shows its work as it does.
01
Sign in with Claude CLI.
The plugin authenticates against the user's Claude account through the local Claude CLI — no separate keys, no separate billing surface. The same Claude users already trust, inside the tool they already work in.
02
Scripts, rigs, renders.
Claude builds expression-driven controls, parameterized rigs, render queue configs, and complex multi-comp setups — the assembly layer designers don't enjoy and shouldn't be doing by hand.
03
Trained on AE specifically.
Weeks of tuning the plugin's context, prompts, and tool surface so Claude works fluently in After Effects — not generic code, but expressions, layer hierarchies, comp wiring, render passes.
04
Shows what it's doing.
Every action surfaces in the panel as it happens. Designers stay in the loop, can stop or redirect, and learn the tool's mental model as they use it — instead of getting a black-box output.
Tools that compress setup.
I built the plugin in Claude Code over several weeks — vibe coding my way through a plugin architecture I didn't start out knowing, then iterating on prompts, tool design, and AE-specific context until Claude could fluently script, rig, and render inside After Effects.
The interesting thing isn't the plugin. It's what the plugin made true: a motion designer can now author the tools that solve their own workflow problems. No engineering ticket, no waiting for a roadmap. The pipeline becomes something you reshape as you work.
This is what excites me about the moment we're in: AI as a force multiplier on a designer's autonomy. Not "AI makes the work for you." More like — AI makes it possible for a single designer to ship the kind of bespoke tooling that used to take a team and a quarter.
100s of hours
Saved on rig setup, documentation, & render pipelines
Adopted internally
Shared with teammates as a daily workflow tool
Developed externally
In ongoing development as a tool for the wider AE community
The point of the plugin isn't that AI did the work. The point is that designers got their creative time back.
Setup, documentation, packaging, render config — the parts of the job that quietly eat hours — get handled in the panel. The hours come back to the part of the job a designer is actually hired to do: the creative decisions only they can make.
Designers, doing more of the creative decisions only they can make.