Gray MacKenzie

I made this product launch video over the weekend with just prompts It's all vibe coded x.com/Remotion/statu… There's something you should know, though: Like everyone else, a few days ago my timeline started getting full of videos like this when Remotion launched their Claude skill, so I decided to give it a go I was captivated by all the examples, so I started like everyone was saying: "just write a prompt" I typed the prompt, and it created an extremely bland, untasteful, stock-looking video 10 prompts in and it was not getting better. It was very, very bland. But at least it was something, so I kept going at it I ended up spending my entire weekend on this, 2-3 days of work. Only to realize my original reference videos that inspired me to get started were all fake Everyone was outright lying about their results. They all claimed "I made this with just one prompt", but it was just bait, they didn't really use Remotion or code at all, it was just a normal, human-made motion video Then you expand the X post and read the replies and they're all like "haha joke" in the comments, but their main post already got 1.5 million views and bamboozled everyone who didn't read further And this is a problem: when a viral trend happens, these posts flood your timeline, and you only realize that they're all noise and bait (and that they haven't even used the tools they claim) when you click through the post and read its comments. But 90% of people (like me, initially) just see the post on their timeline while scrolling, and assume it's all real. You don't go in to check every single post you see: you just like it, or save it for later, and carry on with your day, thinking what you saw was the real thing, and that it's all outstanding results, and that motion designers are really done And it's so anxiety inducing, because everyone is hyping their results, but most of it is just not true. I have stopped reading X lately because going in makes me so anxious, everyone is claiming extraordinary outlier results just for the views and clicks, and you feel like you're lagging behind and you're not good enough because you don't get those results So for this video I decided to actually take the tech out for a spin, and see what results I could really get out of it I used Remotion and Claude Code 4.5, but contrary to what everyone was claiming, this video was not "just a prompt". It was fully vibe coded, but it required much more than a prompt. It was multiple days worth of work Here's what I learned: - Making vibe coded videos with Remotion is ~10-20x slower than building app code. I've been wasting my Claude limits on this video - Everything takes a lot of manual work and reprompting. You often need to go frame by frame correcting tiny things - It makes very silly mistakes - Even Opus 4.5 has very very limited knowledge of spatial / visual things. It doesn't understand well z-indexes, layers, compositions, proportions, temporal coherence, etc. Claude Code feels extremely dumb when creating code for Remotion videos, which surprised me a lot, beacuse I had been mind blown by how incredibly well it worked with my Ruby on Rails SaaS codebases - You need to have some design knowledge to adjust things manually, you need to ask for exactly what you want, in the technical jargon it expects. You can't just say "make this more beautiful" or "animate this better" because it just creates slop - Right now vibe coded videos are promising, but I think I could have done this video faster just by doing it manually in After Effects. It really took that much work - If you have a creative idea for something you want to animate, it takes multiple hours of back and forth prompting to create just one or two seconds worth of **good** animation - Tip: PARAMETERIZE everything! It tends to hardcode magic numbers everywhere in the code, so if you change something earlier in the video timeline, everything else breaks. You want to essentially be creating "key frames" with code by telling it to parameterize every frame where something important happens, and calculate the rest of the keyframes based off that. This comes in handy when you need, for example, to adjust keyframes to match the music So in summary: vibe coded videos are promising, but right now it only works for very stock-looking videos unless you put in a ton of effort Maybe actually useful for 1-2 second web animations though, I'll try that next It will obviously get better, this feels like the quality of code generation in 2023-2024, you need to hold its hand and correct it at every step along the way. But even if video code generation was better, you would still need someone with motion design knowledge to at least set the creative direction, lay out the overall script and composition, etc. It's not completely hands-off unless you want slop And a word on caution: especially here on X, there's 90% hype and 10% reality, nothing is what it seems. Do not believe what you see online, people are constantly baiting and then just laughing it off in the comments