A free macOS studio for software demos

Lumae records your screen and lets you make beautiful edits all in one app. It does screenshots too, and an AI agent can do the editing for you!

The problem

I make a lot of short product demos for work. Sometimes a quick GIF of an interaction, or longer end-to-end product demos. And it was hard finding a single app that could do everything well from recording to editing. I recorded in one, stitched clips in another, narrated and added music in a third, and annotated the release note screenshots in a fourth. So I made my own!

Also, no other software was MCP enabled. I work with Claude Code open beside me, and “cut the dead air and zoom on the clicks” now takes one sentence to ask for.

What I built

A single native Mac app for the whole job: record, edit, narrate, caption and annotate.

Before starting, I knew I would hop between working in the timeline myself alongside Claude potentially also doing edits. So I decided how edits would work and made sure that foundation was stable. Every change to a project is a small command. A drag on the timeline and a request from an agent go through the same set of commands, and nothing edits the project any other way. They share the same undo/redo list, and adding new features in Lumae never drifts from what the Agent can access.

I asked Claude Code to trim, zoom and caption a recording. It previewed first, then applied three edits, each one Command-Z away.

What changed

A demo now starts and ends in Lumae. I can record, and ask Claude Code to trim the start and add zooms on the clicks, and watch the edits land in the editor. If I fumble a click, I re-record that one clip and the rest of the timeline stays where it was. The release note screenshots come from the same app, framed on the same backdrop as the video.

I also stopped skipping the polish. Zooms can be placed automatically from the clicks Lumae recorded, the cursor is redrawn smooth, and camera moves get real motion blur, all by default!

A zoom mid move. The blur is sampled the way a camera shutter would catch it.

The screenshot editor. Every mark stays editable, so you can come back and move the arrow.

Lumae is free and has no account. Nothing you record leaves your Mac.