AKARI Video is a video editor where an AI agent does the editing. The app is not a place to edit — it is a place to review and fix. Give the agent your footage and it assembles everything from analysis and cuts to captions, narration, and BGM, while you look at the result and correct only where it drifts from your intent.

Intent is human. Hands are AI.

Status: under construction — the desktop shell is mid-migration (the previous shell implementation is preserved at akari-video-tauri). The headless path (opencode + Claude Code + Cursor Agent + skills) is usable today.

Throw video editing at an AI "to save time" and you get mass-produced content nobody can call their own. Do it all yourself and cutting, transcription, captions, and audio cleanup eat the whole day.

AKARI Video was built to break that trade-off.

• Humans do exactly two things — say what you want to make, and check that the result feels like you. Everything else (analysis, cut decisions, drafting, formatting, verification) is the agent's job
• Review-and-tweak is the shortest path — the edit is nearly finished when you open it. Not a screen for building a timeline from scratch, but a screen for reviewing a finished edit and fixing it with a drag and a sentence
• Your decisions stay on record — approval gates and decision logs keep "what the human decided" traceable at all times

The agent and the human collaborate on the same save data (file contracts).

• edit.json is the single source of truth — instead of stacking tool calls, the agent reads and writes the save data directly. Fast, robust, diffable
• No presets for expression — captions, titles, shapes, and 3D are drawn freely by AI in HTML/CSS/Three.js. The intake is wide open; the engine only does compositing
• Human actions land in data too — drags and value tweaks are written back to edit.json, data attributes, and CSS variables. Humans and AI share the same files without colliding
• Headless-first — everything from planning to export works with opencode, Claude Code, or Cursor Agent alone, no UI required. The app can open the same project later and continue

The workflow is packaged as skills, one per stage:

flowchart LR
    A["Plan<br/>research-plan"] --> B["Analyze footage<br/>analyze-footage"]
    B --> C["Edit plan<br/>edit-plan"]
    C --> D["Captions / Narration<br/>overlay-authoring<br/>generate-narration"]
    D --> E["QA & Review<br/>edit-lint<br/>address-review"]
    E --> F["Export<br/>render-cut"]
    F --> G["Harvest assets<br/>harvest-asset"]
    G -.assets feed the next plan.-> A
    classDef stage fill:#1a1a1a,stroke:#ff8a00,color:#ffffff
    class A,B,C,D,E,F,G stage

Export now defaults to the v2 OSR engine on macOS. Pass --engine legacy to use the previous compositing path; Windows continues to default to legacy for now.

Whichever entrance you start from, everything converges on the same file contracts (under .akari/). Stop halfway and you can resume from any other entrance.

As a Claude Code plugin: claude plugin marketplace add AkariLabs/akari-video → claude plugin install akari@akari (Getting Started §B).

npm i -g akari-video never uses sudo. If it fails with EACCES (permission error), prefer install.sh above (user-space, no admin password needed) or configure an npm user prefix instead. The desktop app provisions its own akari CLI automatically — no separate install needed there.

First steps: docs/getting-started.md.

• Introduction — philosophy and the big picture
• Getting Started — create your first project
• Guides — task-based guides: analyze footage, plan the edit, export, …
• Skills Catalog — the 26-skill map: what each owns and what it connects to
• How-to — connections & API keys, project structure, resuming a session
• Reference — specs for file contracts such as edit.json
• Entry point: docs/README.md

• apps/shell/ — Theia-based desktop shell
• packages/ — shell-independent libraries (schemas, frame engine, surface runtime, akari-launcher)
• templates/ — project scaffolds (include .opencode/ config)
• skills/ — agent-side stage skills (26 of them)
• plugin/ — Claude Code plugin bundle (skill pack + SessionStart hook + /akari)
• catalog/ — curated add-on catalog (reference-only distribution)
• docs/ — user docs + spec contracts

The code is under the MIT License. Assets handled via assets/ / catalog/ follow the license notice in each item's meta.json. Bundled third-party binaries (ffmpeg / ffprobe, GPL builds) are documented in NOTICE.md.