luthiraabeykoon

I came across this project recently and thought it was pretty interesting. Remotion is an open source framework that lets you create videos using React components instead of a traditional video editor.

You define scenes, animations, audio, and transitions in code, and it renders to formats like MP4, WebM, or GIF. Since it’s React-based, it works well for data-driven or templated videos, automated content generation, and anything you’d normally struggle to do in a timeline UI.

Feels especially useful if you’re already comfortable with modern frontend tooling and want reproducible, programmatic video output.

I’ve been working on an open-source project called Julie (desktop AI assistant, local-first, agentic computer use). It started as a personal tool and has grown enough that I’m considering turning it into a real product. I have a ton more features i didnt push yet, including bug fixes and determinisim in the agent behaviour.

I have about $5k I can realistically put toward this and I think it could be sustainable if I can get a small but real group of users.

I’m trying to sanity check a few things before committing:

Is this the kind of thing people actually pay for, or does it stay a hobby/open-source tool?

What would you focus on first to validate demand without burning the budget?

Any advice on early distribution for dev tools like this?

i use qwen3-8B for text and qwen3-vl-4B for vision

Good question. Local LLMs are already “good enough” for most in-context work: short-to-medium writing, refactors, reasoning over what’s on screen, and multi-step agent plans where latency and privacy matter more than raw IQ.

I still fall back to remote models for very long-context tasks, heavier code synthesis, or when you want best possible reasoning over large codebases, the goal is to default local, then escalate only when it actually adds value.

One small note: I’m finally at a place where I’m genuinely happy with where this landed, so I’ll probably pause active development for a bit.

That said, I’m excited to see how people use it, and I’ll still be around to answer questions and fix issues if they come up.