I Built an AI That Cuts Your Podcast Into Shorts. But I Didn’t Want It to Edit Your Content.

The story behind AI Clip Cutter — and why we’re building AI editing around one simple idea: the creator should stay in control. Press enter or click to view image in full size There is an uncomfortable truth about short-form content: Most creators don’t have a content problem. They have a time problem. You can spend an hour recording a podcast. Two hours researching. Three hours having a conversation worth sharing. And then discover that turning that one long video into five genuinely good Shorts is going to take another afternoon. Finding the moments. Cutting them. Reframing them. Writing captions. Making sure the captions don’t start halfway through a sentence. Checking whether the clip actually makes sense without the 30 seconds of conversation before it. Then doing it again. And again. And again. That was the problem that led us to build AI Clip Cutter. AI Clip Cutter But there was another question behind it: What if AI didn’t need to replace the editor? What if it could simply do the boring part incredibly well? The idea was simple Take a long-form video. Find the moments worth sharing. Turn them into short vertical clips. Add captions. Let the creator decide what gets published. Sounds obvious. But once we started building it, we realized that “find the best clips” is not actually a simple problem. A 60-minute podcast can contain dozens of technically valid 30-second sections. But most of them aren’t good Shorts. Some start in the middle of an argument. Some need 45 seconds of context. Some contain interesting information but have no hook. Some are emotional but say nothing. And some sound incredible when you’re sitting inside the full conversation — but completely confusing when they’re watched alone. So we needed the AI to understand something more important than: “What was said?” It needed to understand: “Would someone want to watch this?” We don’t ask AI to pick “interesting” moments This was one of our biggest product decisions. Instead of asking the mode