Claude Edits 90% of This Show. It Built Me a Tool for the Rest

About this episode

This podcast is edited with Claude Code. Nick shows how the video editing works, from the raw recording to the YouTube Shorts, and the editing tool he had Claude build for the part it could not get right on its own.

It starts with a premise Nick calls the meter. Picture a scale from 0 to 100. At 0, you do everything yourself. At 100, you press a magic button and the finished work pops out. The goal is to push your work as far toward 100 as today's tools allow, and then cover the last mile yourself, with taste, opinion and craft. Jesse adds that some work has a much lower ceiling than others. He also names the worry that this automates jobs away, says the risk is real, and argues for a responsible version: drop the tedious parts of a job, do not stack shortcuts.

Then Nick walks through how an episode gets made. One command in Claude Code starts it. From there his setup, what he calls "my AI chief of staff" (linked below), pulls in the files we record on Riverside, makes a first cut that takes out dead air and mistakes, and hands back a rough version to watch. On his screen, every blue step runs on its own and every amber step is his: watching that rough cut and giving notes, picking the shorts, writing the hook text, and approving what goes out.

The shorts are where it got hard. Asking Claude in plain words to cut after a certain word worked most of the time, but some cuts landed in the middle of a word. The end of a word like "silence" is soft, and to a computer a soft ending can look like quiet, so it cut too early. So he had Claude build him his own editing tool. It shows each short's audio as a waveform with the words underneath. He selects words and presses Delete, moves the joins and listens again, and can search the whole episode's transcript to pull in a line from anywhere. Nick says he did not write any code for it. He asked Claude Code in plain language. After he saves, the rest runs on its own again: the render, captions, hook text and covers, then checks for loudness, length and captions over someone's face, then scheduling.

Near the end, Jesse asks: should you build your own tools, or use what already exists? Riverside has an MCP server that connects AI tools like Claude to your recordings. Nick has not tried it, so this is not a comparison. His answer is that stakes matter. Work for a paying client cannot break at the wrong moment. For his own show, a small glitch is low stakes. Jesse makes the case that not everyone should set out to build their own tools, and that any step in counts, even just using Riverside's MCP to put your files in the same place every time.

Where they land: everyone should be working with agents, whatever your background. Jesse's advice is to start small, with two steps, and add the next one when you need it.

Links

Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

Meet Ada, Nick's AI chief of staff (our episode on it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbfFbKJ0REA

Riverside's MCP server (we have not tried it): https://riverside.com/mcp

Our newsletter: https://notreplacedyet.ai/#newsletter

Everything else we make: https://nryet.ai

Timestamps

0:00 Cold open

0:20 Welcome to Not Replaced Yet

0:43 Today: how this show gets edited with Claude

1:35 The meter, from 0 to 100

3:00 Jesse: some work has a ceiling

3:14 The human covers the last mile

3:40 Jesse: a responsible way to use this

4:41 One command runs the episode

5:22 Jesse: you don't need slash commands

5:52 Pulling the files in and the first cut

6:48 Blue is automation, amber is me

8:51 AI video vs AI video editing

9:17 Jesse: engineering, without writing code

9:58 What's under the hood

11:00 Three beats to a short

11:27 Candidates on a page, picked by number

12:31 I write the hooks

13:11 Why AI cuts land mid-word

15:07 Telling it in words was lossy

16:14 The cut desk

18:05 Select words, press Delete

19:19 Seams

20:36 Add a line from anywhere in the episode

22:39 Render, gates, schedule

23:59 The thumbnail tool

25:38 Build your own or use Riverside's MCP

26:51 Jesse: not everyone should build their own

27:56 Stakes matter

29:29 Everyone should be working with agents

30:24 A better hour spent

31:17 Wrap

We are Nick and Jesse, two brothers running a marketing agency where AI agents do a real share of the work, and this show is what we actually use and what did not work.

This episode is sponsored by NonFiction Agency: https://nonfiction.agency