Roadmap

Timeline performance enhancements

No notes for this release.

Fixes

• Playback stays perfectly in sync. Audio and the playhead now stay locked together during play, fast-forward, and pause — the playhead follows exactly what you hear instead of drifting ahead of it. Scrub to a spot, press play, and it starts right where you expect.

Highlights

• Restrained, deliberate zooms (agent skill). The editing skill now treats zoom as scarce punctuation — roughly one zoom per 2–4 minutes, on key setup/navigation/small-target moments, staying wide while results and content play out — instead of punching in on every click. In a golden-scored agent eval this lifted zoom-placement match vs hand-edits from F1 0.22 → 0.67 (over-production 7 zooms → 1) with no change to cut accuracy.

Highlights

• New cc-cli analyze-beats — chapter a recording into beats. Splits the timeline into coherent sections wherever the content shifts (a long pause, a scene change, or a change of topic) — no AI calls, fully deterministic. Each beat reports its time range, why it broke, whether it has on-screen action, and a short label, so you can see a video's structure at a glance.

Highlights

• cc-cli audit-edit now scores cuts and dead air too. The combined edit scorecard adds a cuts_clean check (flags risky cut boundaries) and advisory dead-air totals (removable silence still left in the edit), alongside the existing zoom, audio, CTA, and ramble dimensions — a fuller one-call grade of an edit.

Highlights

• New cc-cli retime-zooms — fix zoom timing without touching placement. Re-times every existing zoom so it lands ~0.65s before its click, never ramps before the element is on screen, and holds until the spoken thought finishes — keeping each zoom's anchor and scale exactly as planned. Run --dry-run to preview the plan first; snapshot before applying and revert if the motion doesn't read right.

Highlights

• New cc-cli audit-edit — one-call edit scorecard. Grades an edit against every objective taste rule at once (zoom framing + timing, voice loudness, CTA spacing, ramble) and returns a single verdict: overall_zoom_pass, audio_voice_pass, per-dimension checks, and advisory trim seconds. The agent skill now points to it as the objective QA step.

Highlights

• New cc-cli audit-cta. Objective call-to-action rate-limiter: keeps your first clean ask and flags too-close repeat CTAs (affiliate/subscribe/"use my link") plus the salesy justification around them for trimming. Tutorial steps with on-screen action are always kept.
• New cc-cli audit-ramble. Flags condense-worthy ranges — stretches with no on-screen action that repeat an earlier point or over-justify and stray from the video's promise — snapped to completed-thought boundaries so a tighter rewrite stays cohesive.

Highlights

• New cc-cli audit-zoom-timing. Objective, read-only scoring of zoom timing: for each zoom-in it measures whether the zoom lands ~0.5–0.8s before the click, doesn't start before the element is on screen, and holds until the spoken thought finishes — counting any violations.
• New cc-cli audit-loudness. Objective voice-level check from the recording's audio meter: reports speech loudness, true-peak, clipping and too-quiet percentages, and a peak-safe gain to apply to normalize the voice without clipping.

Highlights

• New cc-cli audit-zoom-framing. An objective, read-only check that scores whether your clicks stay inside — and near the center of — the frame while a zoom is active. Reports a framing_score (higher is better) and flags any click that lands off-frame, so a zoom pass can be graded automatically instead of by eye.

Fixes

• Recording controls register on the first click. Start, Pause, and Stop now respond to the very first click even when Context Cut isn't the front-most app (e.g. clicking Pause from another window while recording) — no more needing to click twice.

Highlights

• Studio review, as panels. The paused-recording review is now three clean panels — a Feedback list on the left, the Preview above the Timeline on the right — matching the rest of the studio. Pausing slides the feedback and timeline panels in and resuming fades them out, while the preview stays put.
• Feedback list. Every suggestion shows in the left panel; click one to jump the timeline there and open its editor, or delete it right from the list. The list stays smooth no matter how many notes you have.

Highlights

• Studio review, rebuilt. Pause a recording and the preview shows right away, with the comment box now front-and-center over the video the moment you mark a range — type a note and confirm with a checkmark. Click any existing suggestion to reopen it and edit its text, change its range, or delete it; drag either edge and it moves live. Overlapping suggestions are easier to tell apart, and the transcript loads in the background so pausing feels instant.
• Instant Pause. Clicking Pause now registers on the first click — even when Context Cut isn't the front app — and shows a "Pausing…" indicator immediately instead of hanging.

Improvements

• Stickier, smarter snapping. Snap points hold a little more firmly so you can't scrub straight through an edge, and release cleanly when you pull past. The render range now snaps to clip edges, the timeline snaps only to current clip edges (not stale or hidden ones), and dragging a clip's edge out stops at the end of its source instead of repeating.
• Cleaner transport buttons. Start, Pause, and Stop are clickable across the whole button with a clear hover state — and a crash when clicking them is fixed.

Highlights

• Snapping, on your terms. Hold Shift while dragging to snap; release for free movement — one consistent rule across the whole app. It applies to the playhead, clip trim edges, moving clips (butts up against the neighbor instead of overlapping), the render range, scrubbing in the keyframe editor (snaps to keyframes), and the paused-recording review selection. Prefer it the other way? Flip the snap toggle in the timeline toolbar to snap-always, and Shift will temporarily free movement instead.

Highlights

• Snapping, on your terms. Hold Shift while dragging to snap; release for free movement — one consistent rule across the whole app. It applies to the playhead, clip trim edges, moving clips (butts up against the neighbor instead of overlapping), the render range, scrubbing in the keyframe editor (snaps to keyframes), and the paused-recording review selection.

Highlights

• Audio effects. Add Gain and Treble to any clip and keyframe them over time — bring the level up or down, brighten or dampen the highs. You hear them live while you play, and they're baked into your export exactly the same way.
• Reliable exports with audio. Fixed a render that could stop partway through on projects that have audio.

Improvements

• Auto-zoom now exports exactly as it looks in the preview — same framing and motion, edge to edge when there's no zoom.
• Clearer command-line messages (for example, "Timeline not found: …" instead of a raw error code) and assorted stability fixes.

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.