The AI Assistant
How to open the AI assistant, what you can ask it to do, and how its edits show up on your timeline.
The assistant lives in a panel called Agent Terminal. It's a real terminal, not a chat window. You type a request in plain English at the prompt, press Enter, and the assistant answers and works in the same window. It's wired into the same editing engine as the rest of the app, so it can genuinely change your project, not just talk about it.
Open the panel
Choose View → AI Assistant Panel. The panel appears on the right side of the window, next to the Properties panel. The same menu item hides it again, so if you don't see the panel, this is where to bring it back.
To make the panel wider or narrower, drag the divider on its left edge. The app remembers the panel's size and whether it was open.
What you need first
The assistant runs on Claude Code, a separate command-line tool from Anthropic. It must be installed on your machine and logged in with your own Claude account. The app describes it the same way in two places: the API Keys page in Preferences notes that "The AI agent terminal is separate — it logs in with your own Claude Code account and does not use these keys," and the Rough Cut dialog's Agentic engine says it "Needs Claude Code logged in on this machine."
If Claude Code isn't installed, the panel still opens, but you get a plain command prompt instead. A message in the terminal tells you the Claude CLI wasn't found.
What you can ask it to do
Edit the timeline. Cut clips at a point, trim them, move them, duplicate them, and delete them. Delete or disable whole time ranges, with the option of short audio fades so mid-speech cuts don't click. Add media to the timeline by name, at a time you choose.
Adjust how clips look and sound. Set clip volume, add or remove audio fades, turn clips on or off, and change a clip's position, scale, rotation, opacity, and crop. It can apply a change across a whole time range in one step, like a zoom that covers a section of the video.
Work with tracks, markers, and links. Mute, solo, lock, hide, or show tracks. Create, move, and rename markers, including range markers. Link or unlink audio and video clips.
Import media. Ask it to import files into the media bin by their location on disk. The bin updates live and background processing starts as usual.
Answer questions about your project. Ask what's on the timeline, what's in your transcripts, or what the AI tools found, such as face tracking or motion results. It can also tell you which tools have already run.
It has no export command. When the edit is ready, run the export yourself. See Export to Premiere Pro.
How its edits behave
The assistant's edits land on the timeline exactly like your own. The timeline redraws live while it works, and one press of Ctrl+Z undoes each edit, with a readable name in the undo history like any manual change. See Tools and Selection for how undo works.
Markers created by the assistant draw a small sparkle badge on the timeline ruler, so you can tell them apart from your own. Other edits carry no badge.
Locked tracks are respected. If you ask for an edit on a locked track, the assistant refuses and tells you why in the terminal.
When it saves or starts a tool
Ask the assistant to save and it goes through the same save the File menu uses. The title bar shows the right project name, the unsaved-changes asterisk clears, and the status bar's Last saved: time updates. A Save As it performs renames the project to the new file's name, exactly as it would if you did it yourself. No save dialog ever pops up on you.
A tool run the assistant starts is an ordinary run. It appears in the Background Tasks popover with its progress, you can cancel it there like any other, and anything it produces for review lands in the Review tab. See Run an AI Tool.
Stop and restart the assistant
The panel header shows the assistant's state: Running, Stopping…, Stopped, or Restarting…. While it's running, a Stop button in the header stops the assistant process.
When the assistant is stopped, a card reading Agent stopped covers the terminal, with a Restart button and the hint "or press Enter". Clicking Restart or typing any key in the terminal starts it again. If the assistant quits on its own, you see the same card.
To interrupt the assistant mid-task, click into the terminal and press Ctrl+C. This only works when nothing is selected. If clips are selected, Ctrl+C copies the clips instead, and if terminal text is selected, it copies that text. So if the interrupt doesn't land, deselect first and try again.
The conversation doesn't survive a project switch
Opening a different project restarts the assistant. The conversation and everything in the terminal window are gone, by design. This also happens if you ask the assistant itself to open another project, so make that your last request in a conversation.
The Rough Cut tab
While an Agentic Rough Cut run exists, the panel gains a second tab named Rough Cut next to Agent. It's a watch-only view of that run, separate from your conversation, and you can't type into it. See Build a Rough Cut.