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Launch HN: Cardboard (YC W26) – Agentic video editor

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Re: Launch HN: Cardboard (YC W26) – Agentic video editor

#81
Congrats on the launch. The client-side rendering on WebCodecs/WebGL2 is impressive — that alone is a hard technical problem most teams avoid.

One thing I've been thinking about building in this space: there's a fundamental split between understanding what to edit (where VLMs/agents shine) and executing the edit precisely (where you need deterministic operations, not model inference).

Most "AI video editors" blur these two together — they use the same probabilistic approach for both understanding and execution. But when a user says "cut the first 3 seconds and add a 0.5s crossfade," that shouldn't go through a model. That should be a precise, repeatable operation.

The Cursor analogy in your roadmap is apt — Cursor works because it predicts intent but executes through deterministic code transforms, not by asking an LLM to write the whole file. Same principle applies to video.

Curious how you handle the boundary between agent-proposed edits and deterministic timeline operations under the hood?

Re: Launch HN: Cardboard (YC W26) – Agentic video editor

#82

Congrats on the launch. The client-side rendering on WebCodecs/WebGL2 is impressive — that alone is a hard technical problem most teams avoid. One thing I've been thinking about building in this space: there's a fundamental split between understanding what to edit (where VLMs/agents shine) and executing the edit precisely (where you need deterministic operations, not model inference). Most "AI video editors" blur the…

- models are good at precise edits, we have an internal benchmark for the same

- plan mode / agent mode is something that'd be helpful in deciding / executing

Re: Launch HN: Cardboard (YC W26) – Agentic video editor

#85

As a professional video editor (short-form and feature films) I've always thought realtime collaboration on a timeline makes no sense. Editors' decisions can be mutually destructive / conceptually incompatible.

Fair point. What we mean by collaboration is closer to how Figma works. From our user interviews, video creation almost always involves multiple people but in different ways: screenwriters, marketers, designers, directors reviewing the edit and sharing feedback. The value might not be co-editing the timeline, it's making the feedback / iteration loops faster.

But DO you have a shared timeline?

If so, why?

Re: Launch HN: Cardboard (YC W26) – Agentic video editor

#87

Really impressive execution on the agentic workflow architecture. The challenge you mentioned about "asking more questions upfront" instead of rigid workflows resonates deeply from building production AI agents. The key insight is that agentic systems work best when they have rich context about user intent rather than trying to guess from minimal input. Video editing is particularly challenging because the feedback l…

yeah, it's hard to have verification loops for things like "does this looks good?" / "is it engaging" for sure
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