Agentic Product Demo

Point your coding agent at your product and get a demo video back — built in React, not recorded off a screen.

What's in it · Your first clip · Motion rules · Working with an agent · The frame gate · Licensing

The hard part is not making a video. It is making one that does not look like a screen recording. This repo is the motion vocabulary, the render pipeline and the frame gate that got mine there, plus the skill file that makes an agent follow them instead of improvising.

src/compositions/Demo.tsx — sixteen seconds, exactly what npm run render gives you on a fresh clone. Nothing on screen snaps between frames: the counter counts, the rows stagger, the pointer stops before it presses. A screen recording of a real app shows every one of those as a teleport.

npm install
npm run adopt ../src/app/globals.css   # take your product's real tokens
npm run studio     # preview at localhost:3000
npm run preview    # stills on every beat + a contact sheet — seconds
npm run render     # renders, stitches, and gates the result

Node 20+. First render downloads a headless Chromium (~100 MB); if that fails see Troubleshooting.

Works with Claude Code, Cursor, or anything else that loads a skill file. It reads your product, puts up a shot list, and waits for you to correct it — what that looks like. Then it writes the composition, renders it, and refuses to pass a render it cannot verify.

The same pipeline, cut for Athana — five movements, one flow, no screen recorder. It runs on that product's own assets, which is why the composition that ships here is the generic one above.

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What's in it

src/motion.ts	The vocabulary. Curves, durations, stagger, and the helpers that stop states teleporting. Imports nothing.
src/title-card.tsx	The cold open — words rising out of per-word masks.
src/chrome.tsx	The fake app window, the pointer, the click beats.
src/compositions/Demo.tsx	A worked example. Copy this, change the flow.
scripts/preview.sh	Stills on every beat, plus a contact sheet. What the gate cannot see.
scripts/render.sh	Sequence render → 1536×960 mp4 + poster → gate.
scripts/check-frames.mjs	The frame gate. See below.
scripts/add-sfx.sh	Optional sound pass over the finished mp4.
scripts/beats/	One beat file per clip — where the sound is scored.
.claude/skills/product-demo/	The skill: the playbook an agent reads before touching any of it.
AGENTS.md	What an agent needs on arrival — commands, and the rules it would otherwise break.

AGENTS.md at the root is read natively by Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Aider, Copilot, Gemini CLI and Windsurf — an agent opening this folder is oriented before you say anything. CLAUDE.md points at it rather than repeating it.

Cursor users who want the skill loaded as a skill: copy .claude/skills/product-demo/ to .cursor/skills/. Same file either way.

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Your first clip

The mental model

A composition is a pure function of the frame number. useCurrentFrame() hands you N, you return what the screen looks like at frame N. Nothing is stateful and nothing animates on its own — if a value is not derived from the frame, it does not move.

That is why every clip starts with a beat sheet: a block of named constants for the frame each thing happens on. Look at the top of src/compositions/Demo.tsx — FIELD_CLICK = 20, RUN_CLICK = 88, TOAST_AT = 282. Decide those before you write any JSX, because every entrance, colour change and cursor move is anchored to one of them.

Elements are positioned in absolute pixels rather than with flexbox. A demo is choreography: you need to know where a button is in order to put a pointer on it at frame 214.

1. Copy the example

cp src/compositions/Demo.tsx src/compositions/MyClip.tsx

Rename the export Demo → MyClip and DEMO_LEN → MYCLIP_LEN.

2. Register it

src/Root.tsx currently returns a single <Composition>. Wrap it in a fragment and add yours next to it:

import { MyClip, MYCLIP_LEN } from "./compositions/MyClip";

return (
  <>
    <Composition id="demo" /* … */ />
    <Composition
      id="myclip"
      component={() => (
        <Clip body={<MyClip />} name="My Product" kicker="One line of promise" />
      )}
      durationInFrames={MYCLIP_LEN + TITLE_LEN}
      fps={FPS}
      width={WIDTH}
      height={HEIGHT}
    />
  </>
);

3. Watch it

npm run studio          # localhost:3000, pick "myclip", scrub the timeline

Scrubbing is where the work happens. Jump to a beat, look at it, adjust the constant, look again.

4. Look at it

sh scripts/preview.sh myclip

Reads the beat sheet out of your composition and shoots a still on each beat and again twelve frames later, then tiles them into out/myclip-preview/contact.jpg. Seconds, where a render is minutes.

Do this before every render. The gate that runs afterwards measures two numbers per frame and cannot see whether the picture is right — a panel over the header, a phase drawn empty, a pointer pressing the number above the button all sail through it. Looking is the only thing that catches those, and this makes looking cheap.

It cannot see time, though. Rhythm only exists in motion, so watch the mp4 when it comes out.

5. Render it

sh scripts/render.sh myclip 366     # 366 = which frame becomes the poster

npm run render is just this with demo. Output lands in out/.

The example runs 480 frames — 16 seconds. That is a default, not a ceiling.

Length follows your flow rather than a template. Budget one step, add 66 for the title and ~30 for the outro, and set MYCLIP_LEN to the total:

pace	simple step	movement with its own beats
punchy	70	170
standard	100	240
cinematic	140	330

A three-step flow lands near 14 seconds; a five-movement product story runs past 40. Nothing in the pipeline cares which you pick — the render, the gate and the sound pass all read the length off the composition.

Working with an agent, you do not do this arithmetic: it derives the number from the flow you described and shows its working, so you can answer "punchy" in one word instead of counting frames.

6. Optionally, score it

bash scripts/add-sfx.sh myclip      # out/myclip-sound.mp4

A clip autoplaying in a page has to stay muted — browsers block autoplay with audio, and a scored file simply will not start. So for a page loop the silent mp4 is the deliverable and the scored one is an extra.

For a launch video nobody autoplays: sound can be the point, and the scored file is the one you ship. Either way the pass writes a new file and the silent original is never overwritten.

The pass runs over the already-rendered mp4 and copies the video stream byte for byte (-c:v copy), so no frame is redrawn and the gate does not need re-running. Beats live in scripts/beats/<id>.txt, written against the beat-sheet constants at the top of your composition. Nine sounds, chosen by level of motion rather than by element — the palette and the rules are in scripts/add-sfx.sh and in the skill.

Then make it yours

Run this first, before you draw anything:

npm run adopt                          # finds your stylesheet
npm run adopt ../src/app/globals.css   # or name it
npm run adopt ../app/globals.css --curves --dry-run

It reads your stylesheet and rewrites src/theme.css with your tokens — --primary becomes the kit's --brand, a --poster/--backdrop becomes --ground, and anything with no counterpart is derived from what did match rather than left as a stranger's purple. --curves also copies your cubic-bezier easings into src/motion.ts, so the film moves the way your product moves. --dry-run reports and writes nothing.

It prints what it matched and what it could not, so a half-adopted palette is visible instead of silent:

  ✓ --brand              --primary                taken
  ~ --brand-soft         —                        derived from --brand
  ! --ground             —                        PLACEHOLDER — no match

Handles Tailwind 3 and 4, :root / .dark / [data-theme] / prefers-color-scheme, and one level of var() indirection. It takes the dark palette by default — the title card, the ground and the loop seam all sit on a dark stage — so pass --mode=light for a light demo.

It copies, it does not link. Remotion cannot import an app stylesheet: that pulls Tailwind plugins and font files that live on the app's own serving path. So these are snapshots, the written file records its source and date, and a token you change in the app afterwards needs a rerun. Hand-edits to src/theme.css do not survive the next run — put a deliberate override in a composition, or add your name to ALIASES in the script.

Then, by hand:

1. src/fonts.ts — swap the face. The script tells you which one your stylesheet asks for, but cannot swap it for you: the family has to exist in @remotion/google-fonts or be wired up as a local file. A fontFamily string alone loads nothing; skip loadFont() and every frame silently renders in a system fallback.
2. MyClip.tsx — replace the flow with the real steps of your product, in the real order, with copy taken from the live UI. A demo that walks a flow the product doesn't have proves nothing, however good it looks.

The palette is the cheap half. The copy is what makes a frame recognisable as your software — the real button labels, the real row names, the real empty state. npm run adopt cannot do that part, and the skill is written to stop an agent inventing it.

---

The nine motion rules

These are the difference between a clip that reads as software and one that reads as a screenshot slideshow. Long form in .claude/skills/product-demo/references/motion.md.

1. A boolean in a style is a bug. on ? "var(--brand)" : "var(--border)" snaps in one frame. Anchor a ramp at the frame the state changes and blend the tokens through it.
2. Never scale(0). Entrances start at 0.9–0.97 and travel ≤16px. A 40px entrance reads as a slide deck.
3. Counters count. A number that jumps is the loudest teleport on screen, because the eye is already reading it.
4. Typed text types. Static copy in a field the flow says is being filled reads as a screenshot, and viewers clock it instantly.
5. Nothing enters as a group. Two-frame stagger, minimum.
6. Springs for landing, ramps for travel. Damping 14 or above, or it looks like a toy.
7. Weight and layout stay stepped. Tweening fontSize reflows the row every frame.
8. One hero beat per phase. If everything is animated, nothing reads as animated.
9. The pointer lands on what it presses, and stops there. Take the coordinate off a rendered frame, never off the CSS — estimating a chip's centre from padding and font size put the cursor 94px away, on the counter above it. Then give every target two keys, the second outlasting the press: with one key the pointer starts easing toward its next target the frame it arrives, and the click fires 20 frames into that move.

And the one that is not about motion: never put a lasting transform on the container that holds the whole UI. A scale on the app frame resamples every glyph inside it. Move what is in the frame, never the frame.

---

Working with an agent

.claude/skills/product-demo/SKILL.md is written to be read by Claude Code, Cursor, or anything else that loads skill files. It is not documentation with a YAML header on top — it is a set of refusals.

First it reads your product, then proposes a plan.

If it can reach your repo, your running app or your site, it reads them — the running order of your marketing page tells it which features matter and in what order, and the app tells it what those features actually look like. Neither answers the other's question. Then it drafts the whole thing and asks you to confirm it, rather than interviewing you for what it could have looked up.

Four things have to be settled before a line of a composition gets written:

0. A demo of the whole product, or a scene about one feature? A product demo strings three to five features into movements on a through-line; a feature clip walks one flow start to finish. They are not the same clip at different lengths.

That answer also decides where the clip lives — whole product means a standalone launch video that plays once, one feature means a muted loop in a page section — and with it the loop seam, the sound, the length ceiling and the ending. Both crossings happen, so the agent picks and shows you the pick rather than assuming in silence.

1. What is being made on screen? Not the feature — the thing the viewer watches get built. "A revenue report", "a deploy going out".

2. What does it walk, in order? Real steps, or real features as movements with something carrying the viewer between them. Copy comes from the live product.

3. How does it end? By default on the finished thing — the flow completes and the last state holds long enough to read. No asset, no question. Only when the ending is media your product generates does it need a real file, and there it may propose one from your disk but never fabricate a stand-in.

Most of that you never answer.

Settled is not the same as asked. The agent drafts what it can read — the flow, the screens, the copy, the ending — and only three things come back to you, in one block rather than an interview:

• Scope — the whole product, or one feature?
• Where it lives — a muted loop in a page section, or a standalone clip that plays once? Pre-picked from your scope answer.
• The flow — do you already know the steps you want walked, or should it read your product and propose them?

Each option carries a line saying what it costs you, and the agent's own guess is already selected. That is the difference between this and a form: you are correcting a plan, not filling one in. The usual answer is one click, and so is the correction. In Claude Code it is a native picker; elsewhere the same three arrive in a single message.

The third one matters more than it looks. Reading your product gives a plausible flow, never the right one — the code does not record which path converts, which step people get stuck on, or which feature shipped last week and needs the attention. Only you know that. It is offered once and never pressed: ignore it and the agent reads your product and proposes a flow anyway.

Beyond those three it asks for exactly one more thing, and only sometimes: which file the ending shows, when the payoff is media your product generates and several would do. Fragments are fine as answers everywhere.

Length is deliberately not among them. Asked, it gets answered "short" on reflex, and a demo that rushes the steps it exists to show is the result. The agent derives it from your flow and shows the arithmetic instead — which is what the shot list below is.

Then it reads the screen it is about to rebuild.

The shot list settles what happens. What the clip looks like is decided by how much of your codebase the agent actually reads, and the skill makes that non-optional: nothing on screen may be invented.

Lists on screen — rows, cards, chips, steps — almost never live in the page. They sit in a constants module with the real names, the real subtitles and the real order, and the agent is told to grep a visible string back to its definition and use the whole list. Light or dark is a property of the screen rather than of the product. --primary is often not the accent the surface you are drawing reaches for. Getting any of those wrong yields a clip that renders clean, passes the gate, and is not your software.

It does not ask you for screenshots. Everything a screenshot would settle — the arrangement, the density, the ground, the accent — is in the markup and the classes, and asking for a picture is how an agent gives itself permission not to read them.

Then it shows you the shot list, and waits.

t0    title     "Acme Studio" · "Ask a question, publish the answer"
0     query     types "Revenue by channel, last quarter", hits Run
96    results   five channel rows stagger in, the counter lands on 1,940
184   filter    "Paid only" lights, three rows dim, the total recounts
274   publish   press, the confirmation springs into its slot
380   out       folds back to the dark ground

Four steps and a hold: 66 for the title, four steps just under the standard 100, and 34 to fold out — 480 frames, 16s. Ends on the published report. Say "punchy" for ~12s.

One line per phase, the frame it starts on, and the arithmetic behind the length — so a redirect costs you a word instead of a paragraph.

That checkpoint is the whole reason the interview exists. The failure mode of "make me a demo video" is a beautiful montage of output that never shows what a visitor would actually do, and getting question 2 wrong is the one defect that cannot be fixed in the edit — by the time you see it, the entire clip is built on it. Correcting a line in that list costs a sentence. Correcting it after the composition exists costs a rebuild.

Everything else it decides on its own and tells you in passing: the title copy, the pace, and which single element carries the hero beat of each phase.

If you only take one thing from this repo, take that section.

---

The frame gate

Every render is checked before it is allowed to pass.

scripts/check-frames.mjs looks for two defects. Corrupted frames, where the page texture comes back wrapped or mirrored inside an otherwise correct frame — it hits a handful out of hundreds, at random, so it reads as a flicker rather than as damage, and no encoder setting fixes it because it is already baked into the JPEG. And luminance jumps, including the loop seam: the last frame cutting back to frame 0, which fires every time the video repeats and which nobody inspects.

480 frames, 1536x960

tiled frames: none

luminance jumps over 25: none

loop seam: frame 479 Y=20.0 -> frame 0 Y=20.0   jump 0.0

What it does not check is the picture. Two numbers per frame — half against half, and average luminance — is the whole of it. A panel over the header, a phase drawn empty, a counter cut off, a pointer pressing the wrong element: every one of those passes. That is what scripts/preview.sh is for, and why it runs before this, not instead of it.

scripts/render.sh exits non-zero on a failure, and keeps the frame sequence when it fails, printing the path. The flagged JPEG is what decides whether the encoder is innocent, and being able to open it is the only reason to render through stills at all.

For a clip that plays once rather than looping, pass STANDALONE=1 — the seam check only means something for a clip that cuts back to its first frame, and without the flag the gate fails a launch video for ending somewhere brighter than it started. Remotion's docs also recommend --concurrency=1 for flickering and the render script always passes it — but a flag you have to remember is not a guarantee.

Two known blind spots. Both come from the same heuristic: the tile check asks whether a frame's left half resembles its right half, which is anomalous in a dense interface and perfectly normal elsewhere.

Flat frames. Nearly one colour means matching halves by definition, so only frames with real contrast are judged (FLAT = 120). On a pale, low-contrast UI it will miss corruption a dark one would catch. Lower the threshold for a light product; never raise it to make a failure go away.

Repeating or symmetric content. A grid background, a striped field, a centred layout — the halves match because the design says so. Measured against a motion-graphics render on a grid template, this produced nine false positives out of three hundred frames, every one of them a frame where the foreground text had left and only the grid remained. This detector is built for product UI. On graphic content, read every flag before believing it.

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How much of this is Remotion

src/motion.ts — the vocabulary, and the part worth taking — imports nothing at all: the bezier solver, the clamped span and the damped oscillator behind pop() are written out in the file. It works unchanged under Framer Motion, in a canvas loop, or in React Native.

Remotion itself is five symbols in four files — registerRoot, Composition, Sequence, AbsoluteFill, useCurrentFrame, plus loadFont. It bundles the app, drives the frame clock, runs headless Chromium and gives you the Studio.

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Troubleshooting

Timed out after 25000 ms while trying to connect to the browser!, with an empty Chrome log. Almost never a Remotion problem.

• Remotion's bundled Chromium will not launch on older systems — on macOS it wants 15 (Sequoia). Point it at an installed Chrome instead:

  export CHROME_PATH="/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome"
  

  remotion.config.ts picks that up automatically.

• If you use CHROME_PATH, quit Chrome first. Launching a second instance of an already-running browser hands off to the existing process and exits without opening a debugging port. Nothing is logged, because nothing crashed.

The clip flickers. Run scripts/check-frames.mjs on the mp4 before touching the encoder — that diagnosis is wrong twice as often as it is right. Full debugging order in .claude/skills/product-demo/references/render.md.

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Licensing — read this before you build on it

This kit is MIT. See LICENSE.

Remotion is not. Remotion is source-available under its own licence: free for individuals, non-profits, and for-profit companies up to 3 employees; larger companies need a paid Company License from remotion.pro. That applies to you as soon as you npm install, regardless of what this repo's licence says. Check where you land before you ship something commercial on it.

ffmpeg binaries come from ffmpeg-static and carry their own terms.

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Credits

The motion rules above are a translation of Emil Kowalski's writing and animation skills into the constraints of a rendered file. Two things do not carry over: Remotion has no CSS transitions, and prefers-reduced-motion is meaningless in an mp4. Everything else about curves, properties, durations and stagger applies unchanged, and his material is the best thing to read alongside this.

Built with Remotion.