Give your coding agent a real timeline

Klo, a video editing app for Mac, released an MCP server that lets coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor drive a full video editor—import, cut, caption, grade, and export—while footage stays on the Mac. The server exposes 83 semantic tools over MCP, avoiding the pitfalls of piping video bytes through the text-first protocol, and is off by default with token-gated connections. The setup is a single file for Claude Desktop, and media-generating tools use the user's klo account credits with prices disclosed to the agent.

blog · aug 19, 2026 · 6 min Give your coding agent a real timeline klo ships an MCP server, so Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor can drive a full video editor: import, cut, caption, grade, and export, while the footage stays on your Mac. There are two ways to let an AI agent edit video. The common one is an ffmpeg wrapper: the agent shells out commands, files get re-encoded at every step, and one wrong flag ruins a render. The other is to give the agent what a human editor has: a timeline, named operations, and eyes on the result. klo does the second. Why piping video through MCP fails MCP is a text-first protocol. Push video bytes through it and you hit the known walls fast: base64 blows up the context window, memory dies under concurrent requests, and the agent spends its budget shuttling data instead of making decisions. The contract that works is the opposite: the media never moves. klo holds the footage locally and exposes semantic operations over MCP: split clip , ripple delete , add captions from transcript , set clip grade , generate music , export video , 83 tools in total. The agent sends intent; klo does the heavy lifting on your machine and returns compact results: timecodes, transcripts, real frames when the agent needs to look. What your agent can do with it - Watch a folder and turn every new recording into a captioned vertical clip. - Cut a 40-minute recording down to the 8 minutes where things actually happen. - Read the transcript, pick the best take of each line, and assemble the cut. - Grade a batch of clips to match a reference and export ProRes for the client. These are the same tools klo's own agent uses, so anything you can ask klo in the app, your agent can ask over MCP. Setup For Claude Desktop it is one file: download klo.mcpb /klo.mcpb and open it. For Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or anything else that speaks MCP, klo serves a local endpoint on 127.0.0.1 that any client can register. Turn it on in klo's settings; it is off by default, and every connection is token-gated, so nothing on your machine can drive your editor unless you handed it the key. Because your agent brings its own model, driving the timeline over MCP is free. The handful of tools that generate new media music, voiceover, generated shots use your klo account's credits, and the agent is told the price before it spends. Why this beats the DIY pipeline People have built impressive things gluing Claude Code to ffmpeg and Remotion. The ceiling comes fast: no ripple edits, no beat grid, no karaoke captions, no undo, and every intermediate render costs quality and minutes. A real editor underneath means the agent's tenth edit is as safe as its first, and when it finishes, you can open the project and take over by hand. Get klo.mcpb /klo.mcpb , or get klo for Mac /api/download first and flip on the MCP server in settings.