EffectCraft: an open-source, After Effects-style compositor in pure Rust that agents can drive over MCP

EffectCraft's repo was created on Oct 1 and had about 7,750 stars when we checked on Oct 23. The ArtCraft lineup page now lists 13 open-source apps, all written from scratch in Rust, for image, vector, video, motion, audio, layout and more. That lineup was shared around X this morning. EffectCraft is the one that matters most to us. The README describes After Effects-style panels and shortcuts: Project, Composition, Timeline, Effect Controls and Render Queue. The roadmap says plainly that it is alpha, targets After Effects 2026 parity, and is several hundred hours away from beta.

Three design choices make it a good fit for agents. First, projects are versioned JSON (.ecproj), so an agent can write or diff a composition like code. Second, every menu item, drag and property edit goes through one command registry, so the same actions work from the command line, a JSON control channel and an MCP server, and there is a headless CLI build. Third, Lottie import and export are built in, so an animation can go straight to the web. Encoding and decoding are also pure Rust (VP9, AV1, HEVC, Opus) with no FFmpeg dependency.

It runs on macOS, Windows (including native ARM64), Linux and FreeBSD, plus a WebAssembly build in the browser. The browser build is capped at 4 GiB of memory and has no MCP control. A third-party download page lists v0.16.0 as released Oct 23. For a HyperFrames or Remotion pipeline, the interesting test is whether an agent can make lower thirds or title cards as .ecproj files and render them headless. That would give you keyframes in an editable file instead of code-only animation.

Not tested by us yet. The team itself says not to use it for production client work yet, and the repo had nearly 900 open issues. Creator @varunPbhardwaj posted that he wired six of the apps into Claude Code and found four things that broke, so expect rough edges.