Roadmap

Highlights

• Verbatim live transcription with ElevenLabs Scribe. Add your key in Settings ▸ AI and pick Scribe V2 as the live engine: each time you pause (and on stop) it transcribes what you just said and stitches it together, so the transcript you see on pause is the final one — no separate re-run afterward. It keeps the way you actually talked (fumbles, half-takes, exact proper nouns) instead of cleaning them away, which is what the retake and cut tools need. Stored only in your macOS Keychain (this device), never written to disk or a project file.
• Zooms never jump at a cut anymore. If a clip ends mid-zoom, the zoom carries its exact size and position into the next clip and holds — a punch can't snap back to wide across an edit. When there's room and it makes sense it eases back out; when there isn't, it holds rather than doing a too-fast snap. This is now first class in the cli as a warning.
• Zoom moves now earn their speed from the moment. Instead of one fixed duration, each push-in, pan, and pull-out runs as fast or as slow as the script and the on-screen action justify (a 1.0s floor so nothing feels punchy, up to ~4s for a long, deliberate move), and they aim at the actual element on screen rather than the average of your clicks.

Improvements

• Zoom edges reach cleanly now: a zoom toward the frame edge travels all the way to its mark and the easing lands it, with no rubber-band or "wall" feel at the end of the move.
• Edits are gated on zoom continuity: validation now blocks (not just warns about) any zoom that jumps across a cut, so a broken-feeling zoom can't slip into a render. Intentional resets are still allowed.

Interface

• A cleaner, more unified look across the whole app. Studio, Recordings, Timelines, and Settings now share thin integrated tabs and a full-bleed layout with a hairline gutter, so the window feels like one surface instead of stacked boxes.
• Render now lives in the title bar. The button sits in the top corner of the native window instead of floating inside a panel, so it is always in the same place.
• Every panel — including the preview area and the History and Effects lists — now shares the same dark surface, with squared-off corners and scrollbars and a single consistent set of toolbar icons. The colored accent bar on the active sidebar item is gone for a calmer, more neutral frame.

Cleanup

• Removed the broken get-pending-jobs command, the obsolete context-cut-agent-kit npm scaffold (replaced by install-skill), and stale onboarding docs (the old npx context-cut-agent init flow, .context-cut/ paths, and a validate-zoom-plan command that never shipped).

Highlights

• Zooms move the way they should now
• Zoom edge rails are gentler
• Recordings can now capture much richer on-screen context now

Improvements

• Word endings keep their natural breath room: plosive releases (the k in "joke") and trailing decays now ride down to the noise floor instead of being sliced at the drop-off, with speech-aware guards so retake splices never absorb removed takes.
• Keypress completion now bridges the key-down and key-up clicks ("...and hit enter" keeps the full press), and only sounds that land immediately after the phrase qualify — a retake's first word can no longer masquerade as an action sound.
• The edit-example replay loop is live: scripts/replay-edit-example.sh re-cuts a graded bundle with the current cutter and diffs every join against the human-approved final (cc-edit-eval gained --plan for live candidates). Current score vs the reference edit: 31/31 joins, 41ms mean delta.
• The mascot freezes when the app goes inactive, so a backgrounded app stops spending energy animating him.

Improvements

• The mascot's entrances and exits are properly animated: a small hop in with a rigged landing (knees compress, arms swing down, rebound, settle, blink) and a real jump out (crouch anticipation, spring, gravity drop). Switching timelines plays the full hand-off — the current one leaps away, the next drops in.
• Eye expression changes pass through a quick blink instead of snapping between states.
• His marathon coffee mug is now actually in his hand — handle in his grip, riding his arm — instead of floating beside him.
• The status caption tucks up next to him.

Fixes

• Rapid timeline switches no longer make the entrance and exit animations fight each other or leave an empty perch.

Fixes

• The mascot's status words now live in their own fixed strip: they type in after he lands and backspace out before he leaves, never move him, and never resize anything. He sits centered with the caption starting at the far left.
• His entrance is a proper rigged fall — arms up the whole way down (including when woken from a nap).
• Opening or leaving a timeline no longer announces "finished"; the celebration only plays for work that actually happened while you were watching.

Improvements

• The mascot lost his pop-out card and now lives directly on the sidebar: he falls in and lands when you open the timeline page, picks himself up, and jumps down off the sidebar when you switch away. (Honors reduce-motion.)

Improvements

• Agent cuts adapt to each recording. The cutter now measures how far a recording's word timing drifts from its audible speech and sizes its search windows accordingly — so words that run past their transcript timing no longer get clipped, and quiet word openings are kept without grabbing earlier noise.
• Action sounds that complete a sentence are kept: "...and hit enter" now keeps the actual keystroke through its decay instead of cutting mid-click.
• Cuts that land inside continuous speech now come back with both honest fixes attached — finish the clause, or drop the whole clause — so a reviewing agent or human picks one instead of guessing.
• The little mascot now shows what agents are actually doing, the whole time they're doing it: commands light him up for their full duration (long jobs get the coffee mug), he thinks between commands in a session, celebrates finishes (with a bigger celebration for big batches), looks confused when a cut is blocked, flustered after repeated failures, and salutes your manual edits. All driven automatically by the tools — agents can't pose for the camera. Four new animations (relieved, frazzled, juggling, salute) plus left/right glances.
• New replay harness for graded edits: every reviewed edit can be exported as a bundle and replayed against future cutter versions, so your past corrections automatically judge new changes.
• The agent skill now carries the editorial grammar distilled from graded edits: complete thoughts only, asymmetric tightness, retake handling, and what always gets cut.

Fixes

• Trimming a clip's start with ripple-trim no longer leaves a black gap in the timeline.
• The boundary audit can no longer "restore a word's attack" by reaching into the previous word.
• The timelines list no longer rescans on unrelated file changes inside timeline folders.

Improvements

• Page switching and the timeline editor feel snappier. Opening a timeline no longer re-reads the entire timeline library and no longer loads the same timeline twice; the recency re-sort happens in the background after the switch.
• The recordings and import views now refresh their folder lists in the background, so returning to the app or opening the import dialog shows instantly instead of waiting on a disk scan.
• Thumbnails for recordings and media tiles generate off the interface thread, a few at a time, instead of all at once — scrolling a page of recordings no longer stutters while previews fill in.
• Idle housekeeping is much quieter: the free-disk-space check runs less often when not recording and only repaints when the number meaningfully changes, and cache-generation progress updates are batched instead of flooding the interface.
• Opening a timeline (from the app or an agent) no longer rewrites its metadata file every time, which also stops a feedback loop of file-change events between the editor and command-line tools.

Fixes

• Fixed media tiles in the timeline bin and clip views decoding video frames on the interface thread, which could cause visible hitches when those views appeared.

Improvements

• Agent edits cut on the audio itself. The cc-cli cutter now places every cut at the sound: the outgoing edge lands where a word's energy trails off (the decay knee), and the incoming edge lands right where the next word begins — using word timing only to find the word and the audio level to set the exact frame, so breaths and room tone come out without ever clipping a word. Agents can pass approximate ranges and get back exactly where each cut landed.
• Mid-sentence retakes (where two takes are spliced inside continuous speech, with no natural pause to cut on) are flagged for human review with the best energy-based guess, instead of being cut blindly.
• Per-video editing taste is now captured up front. A new style interview (join tightness, breaths, dead-air threshold, action pauses, head/tail, zooms) is saved with the timeline and drives the cutter and audits, so the same recording cuts to your preferences every time. New cc-cli edit-style get|set.
• Agents land a full batch of cuts in one pass and read a report of what was adjusted, instead of dozens of trial-and-error attempts. Cut-safety problems come back as structured data (which join, why, the suggested fix) rather than prose.
• Transcripts read through cuts now report word times on the frame-accurate alignment clock, fixing a systematic ~0.3–0.5s drift between the transcript and the audio that made some cuts read rough. New --raw-transcript-times opt-out.
• New cc-cli export-edit-example captures a finished edit (timeline, sidecars, notes) as a self-contained example for review and improving the editor over time.

Fixes

• Cuts can no longer silently decouple video from audio. Slicing a clip now keeps linked audio/video pointing at each other, and trim/move/delete verify A/V stays in sync. New cc-cli repair-links re-pairs any timeline whose links went stale from earlier versions.
• The agent skill self-heals: installs that were left in a half-updated state now update cleanly on the next run.

Fixes

• Studio paused review now loads reliably while a recording is in progress: muted audio sources (e.g. system audio with no signal) no longer leave an empty track on the in-progress master file, which made the live recording unreadable until stop. Muted sources append silence instead, so the review player can open the file at any time.
• If a review source file still fails to open, the player sidelines it after a few attempts and falls through to the next candidate (master → final file → proxies) instead of retrying the same broken file until it gives up.
• Background word-alignment work (MFA/ffmpeg) now runs at background CPU priority so it no longer competes with timeline playback and UI on performance cores.

Fixes

• Fixed a crash when opening the Timelines page in released builds: the mascot panel located its resources through a SwiftPM accessor that only worked on the build machine. Resources are now resolved from the app bundle directly, and a missing resource degrades gracefully instead of crashing.
• The studio paused review no longer gets stuck on "Preparing review…" if the in-progress recording file is momentarily unreadable (mid-fragment write) when the review opens — the player now retries until the file is playable.

Improvements

• Studio paused review: pausing a recording now opens an instantly playable review of everything captured so far — a Metal-rendered player with audio, a lightweight timeline strip with transcript words, a draggable playhead, zoom handles, and range selection. Mark ranges with notes while paused; they save as a studio-notes sidecar ({stem}.studio-notes.json) that editing agents read as rough editorial hints. Spacebar toggles playback.
• Final recording transcripts are now generated with the production speech model instead of the quick-pass model, so timeline words are far more complete — especially at clip starts and after pauses.
• The timeline word lane shows a quiet "aligning words…" placeholder while transcription/alignment is still running, instead of an empty strip that reads as silence.
• Word alignment sidecars regenerate automatically with the improved alignment pipeline (wider search beam, number spelling, fallback fill), filling in previously missing word spans.
• Every clip in a timeline now queues word alignment in the background, not just the active clip.
• Live transcription anchors words to the recorder's media clock (filling gaps with silence), so live words land exactly where they belong on the timeline — including after pauses and in long sessions.
• The recording pipeline holds up better under heavy system load: recording queues run at elevated QoS so other apps can't starve them, and optional proxy frame encoding is shed automatically when the frame budget is tight (with a diagnostics counter).
• A pixel mascot panel on the open timeline shows live agent/CLI activity — who is editing and what they're doing (reading, thinking, cutting, building, shipping) — with a typed status ticker.
• CLI/agent edits now appear in the app push-based instead of polling: the open timeline and the Timelines page listen for file-system events (FSEvents), so external cuts reload the clip canvas within a fraction of a second — including while the editor is idle, which previously required stopping playback to pick up changes.
• The CLI now auto-detects who invoked it (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, the app itself, or a human shell) from environment fingerprints and process ancestry. Activity entries default their author to the detected agent — Cursor agents include a per-conversation suffix so two simultaneous agents are distinguishable — and every entry carries agent / agent_via / agent_detail provenance metadata even when a custom --author is passed.
• cc-cli get-transcript and analyze-edit-context now report an alignment status (ready / generating / pending / no_transcript) with a check-back hint, and the transcript command waits at most ~15s on an in-flight alignment instead of blocking until it finishes.
• New cc-cli install-skill command generates the complete agent skill from the binary itself — what Context Cut is, the full editing workflow, and an exact release-synced command map — and installs it to any known host (--agent claude|codex|cursor) or folder. Production and dev builds write separate skills (context-cut-cli vs context-cut-cli-dev, the dev one explicitly marked as the dev version of the app), each with a bundled update-skill.sh that refreshes only from its own channel and preserves locally edited skill files unless forced.
• Agent onboarding is now skill-only: the init-agent per-project scaffold (26 documents) is removed in favor of the single generated skill.
• Settings > AI gains an Agent Skill menu that installs/updates the skill via the app's own bundled cc-cli — listing only detected hosts, with "Install on All" and a custom-folder option.

Fixes

• CLI mutations now follow linked clips everywhere: split, move, trim, ripple-trim, delete, and ripple-delete apply to all linked A/V companions and remap link metadata across new clip IDs, so cuts can no longer decouple video from audio.
• Timeline playback keeps audio and video locked with closed-loop drift correction (gentle rate nudges for small errors, precise re-seeks for large ones), and external CLI mutations invalidate playback audio so the app never keeps playing a stale mix.
• Cut safety audits clamp their ranges to the post-mutation timeline duration, fixing a crash when applying large batch cuts, plus an operator-precedence fix in cut intent validation.
• Batch and live transcription no longer fail an entire recording when the speech model emits an empty segment or invalid timestamps; bad items are repaired or dropped instead.
• Live transcription buffers more audio (24s) before dropping chunks when the model briefly falls behind, so fewer words go missing from live transcripts.

Improvements

• Heavily edited timelines stay snappy: making cuts, hovering, and dragging no longer slow down as the number of clips grows.
• Audio waveforms draw faster when zoomed out on long timelines.
• The Timelines page now scrolls through the full list, orders timelines by when they were created, and shows timelines created by agents or the CLI within a couple of seconds without reopening the app.

Fixes

• Long studio recordings keep audio and video in sync instead of drifting apart over time.
• Microphone audio in recordings now plays back through both speakers instead of only one side.

Improvements

• Timeline Auto Clip is now available from the clip context menu for selected audio or linked video/audio clips, with controls for padding, minimum silence length, continuous long-run removal, noise removal, and optional ripple-delete.
• Dense edited timelines now do less idle redraw work, especially when Auto Clip creates a high number of cuts.
• Timeline zooming and viewport dragging are smoother because expensive transcript/audio detail overlays are deferred during zoom interaction and scoped around the active/playhead region at high clip counts.

Fixes

• Dense timeline hover/click hit-testing now prefilters by track row instead of scanning every visible clip across every pointer event.
• Recordings breadcrumb navigation no longer forces a full recordings rescan when returning to the overview.
• Settings, recordings thumbnails, cache progress polling, and timeline preview lookup paths do less main-thread work during common page switches and playback interactions.

Improvements

• Timeline media-bin drags now feel more immediate, with drag payloads prewarmed and active drag sessions used as a fallback so ghost previews appear while hovering the timeline.
• Linked clip drags are bounded to the intended video/audio companion instead of pulling unrelated clips that happen to share older group metadata.
• Audio cache loading is deferred to reduce timeline-open stutter while preserving transcript/audio detail for zoomed-in work.

Fixes

• Dragging linked clips now keeps paired V/A movement tighter without moving everything else on the timeline.
• Delete and ripple-delete now expand through linked clip metadata, so clicking either the audio or video side of a linked pair deletes both sides together.
• Media-bin drops now recover when pasteboard payload loading completes late, avoiding failed or delayed drops on the timeline.

Improvements

• Timeline Import now opens an in-app Context Cut picker first, with Recent and Projects views for importing Context Cut recordings/projects in bulk.
• Import from My Device remains available from the modal for outside files like standalone audio, video, or project folders.

Fixes

• Dragging media from the bin onto the timeline now previews only the tracks that actually exist in the file.
• Video+audio sources show paired Vn/An ghost previews, while audio-only and video-only sources target only eligible audio or video tracks.

Improvements

• Studio display sources can now be dragged, resized, reset, and edge-cropped directly on the canvas.
• Display/camera canvas manipulation is clearer, with black source backing, thicker resize outlines, and crop-specific affordances.
• Camera mask corner radius now supports values up to 300 for rounder camera treatments.

Fixes

• Camera recording uses a stable capture preset and no longer forces risky active camera formats.
• No-audio MP4 recordings now start reliably when using the VideoToolbox passthrough path.
• Camera recording auto bitrate is raised while staying inside writer-safe limits.

Fixes

• Settings controls are cleaner and more consistent, with Project and storage threshold badges matching the Output dropdown style.
• The Recordings page no longer opens clipped under the top viewport edge.
• Timeline tabs now match the compact Settings tab bar style while keeping close buttons and the + New Timeline action.
• Switching active timelines no longer reorders the open timeline tabs.

Fixes

• Sidebar navigation now uses the same muted inactive color as the version status area, with full-row clickable targets and pointer hover feedback.
• Page switching, Settings, and sidebar collapse/reopen now avoid heavier first-frame work so the app feels more immediate.
• Timelines with only a few tracks now keep the track rows aligned with the 00:00:00:00 playhead/ruler origin.

Fixes

• Desktop sign-in now fails immediately for emails that do not have app access instead of showing a one-time-code field that can never complete.
• Successful sign-in clears stale code state, saves the valid license, and keeps update installs from looping on an expired or rejected auth attempt.
• The app now handles the server's direct not_found desktop auth response without treating it as a transport failure.