Why I built Lua

I make short videos about new AI tools, in Tamil and English. A new model comes out, I try it, I sit down in front of my phone and explain what it does and why it matters. That part I love.

The part that came after was the problem. One reel meant a pile of takes: the same line said four times, a pause while I thought, a sentence I started again halfway. Before anything else I had to find the clean version of every line.

The job before the job

Once the cut was done, the real work started.

• Captions, timed word by word. My reels mix Tamil and English in the same sentence, and the tools I tried either wrote everything in Tamil script or got the English words wrong.
• B-roll. About seventy percent of my b-roll is screen recordings of the product I am talking about: its website, its launch video, the feature in action. Every one of those I had to find, record and trim by hand.
• Caption looks. I built my own caption templates in After Effects, because the stock styles made every reel look like everyone else’s.
• Then the post itself: the Instagram caption, the cover, the time, and the comments asking for the link.

None of that is creative work. It is assembly. And it was eating the hours I wanted to spend on the next idea.

What I actually wanted

I didn’t want an app that makes videos for me. I wanted a team: someone to make the rough cut, someone to do the captions, someone to find the b-roll, someone to write the post and put it up. People who do the boring parts the way I would, and hand the result back so I can change anything I don’t like.

That last part matters most. Every AI editing tool I tried gave me a finished video I couldn’t really fix. If it cut the wrong line, I started over.

Nothing hidden. Every cut, caption and clip the AI makes is something you can see, move and undo.

So I built it

Lua is that team, in one Mac app. You drop in your takes. It cuts the retakes and the silences, and every word it removed stays on screen, struck through, so one click brings it back. It times the captions to every word, in English, Tamil or Tanglish. It records b-roll from the product’s own site and official videos. You get a real timeline, the kind you would find in a pro editor, and an AI chat you can ask to change things.

Then it writes the Instagram caption the way you write them, picks a cover and a time, and posts it when you press Approve. Not before.

Built on my own reels first

Every part of Lua was tried on my own footage before anyone else’s. The caption styles were rebuilt from my After Effects templates and checked against them. The raw cut was checked against the cuts I made by hand. Each step leaves a note saying what it did, so when something goes wrong you can see why.

It isn’t finished. Instagram is the only place it posts today, and YouTube is next. It runs on Macs with Apple silicon. We are opening it to creators in small batches so we can fix what you find before we grow.

If you spend more time editing your reels than making them, I built this for you. Join the waitlist and I will see you in an early batch.