arXiv · 2610.37690
Cassette-Editor: An Agent Harness for Editing Video the Way You Do
Abstract
Coding agents work in an environment built for them: a compiler or a test checks each change and points to the fault, and version control keeps every change in a project people can continue. Video editing agents lack one: an edit's correctness shows only in the costly rendered video, which does not point to the decision at fault, and existing systems offer either editing operations that cover only anticipated edits or a script whose output is a video the user cannot keep editing. We present Cassette-Editor, a complete agent harness for video editing that lets the agent edit the way a person does: knowing what the project allows, seeing what each change affects, and revising from there. The agent writes patches of typed changes to the editor's timeline document. A schema check and a rulebook shared with manual editing check each patch before it commits; a rejected patch leaves the project unchanged and returns each problem located with repair options, and an accepted one becomes a step of the history the user also edits. Reads map source analysis to the frames of the current edit. Because manual gestures are writes in the same language, folded by the same executor and rulebook, the agent can express every change a manual edit makes to the project. On 31 editing requests with the model held fixed, the complete harness passed 89% of trials against 47% for the same model with ten basic editing operations and without the rulebook, at less than half the agent time and cost per successful request; the loss fell on requests at rule boundaries, composite edits, and undo, not on finding content.
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Zhixin Zeng, Jiahao Zhong. 2026-11-03. Cassette-Editor: An Agent Harness for Editing Video the Way You Do. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37690
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