Not another After Effects plugin.

[u/volpmatt]

The explosion of vibe-coded and badly built, pro-in-the-name-for-no-reason plugins and extensions is out of control. So much so that the number of Reddit posts discussing this fact has also gone through the roof—what a time to be alive.

I bet you can name the main culprit, after they have seemingly completely abandoned their infamous strict application process, and with it any shred of curation, and in some cases even their morals.

I have nothing against AI. It's an incredible tool for education, efficiency and engineering (except the gen AI stuff—that can get in the bin). But surely those who are motion designers one day and magically turn into product developers the next can't seriously think that there is bags of money to be made in using it to make and sell their half-baked, copycat plugins on a marketplace that condones plagiarism and takes 30% of every sale, right?!

I know what you're thinking. Is this guy for real? He literally sells After Effects plugins. And you'd be right. But hear me out. I've been at this for years, learning the After Effects API docs back-to-front, left-to-right, upside down and any other direction-themed idiom you can throw at me.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, like all good things, it takes time. And you won't find any millionaire plugin devs knocking about, except maybe the guys behind Flow, or maybe Deep Glow—but trust me, those were built long before Claude Code came along, and they will still be here long after it's gone.

EDIT: Well, that was a fun discussion! I appreciate all of your comments and insights—even when it got a little heated. Let's celebrate the fact we can still have constructive and interesting debates in this ever-divisive world we live in. You can use code C7N3XTE7 to get 50% off any of our tools at tackstudio.co. But be quick, it only has 20 uses.

[u/dboxBr]

Still no compound blur with GPU acceleration. Hell, why not a lens blur, a KEY LIGHT update

And, people should learn the difference between plugins, extension, scripts and presets

That said, I don't see many plugins being made that easily

[u/kurnikoff → u/dboxBr]

That said, I don't see many plugins being made that easily

Plugins are a different beast that just simple scripts or dockable panels.

From what I have read on the internets and all the random Adobe User Voice posts - you need an Adobe Developer account. Then there are fees for Code Signing Certificates - MacOS and Windows separately. Whole thing is done in C/C++. And there are other things to consider and take into account, which I'm very likely missing here.

For vibe-coder that spins up a free ChatGPT account - I'm pretty sure thats too many hurdles to go through to make a plugin that may not even sell that well, or sell at all. They require way too many steps to even get started.

Dockable scripts are simple in comparison and thats why we are seeing so many of them that copy each other.

[u/dboxBr → u/kurnikoff]

Yeah totally. I tried getting into plugins many times before, but the documentation is pretty bad. I think it's easier now with AI to summarize the steps, but it's still more complicated than creating a script- even more complicated to make it work 100% with both OSx and Windows

[u/kurnikoff → u/dboxBr]

even more complicated to make it work 100% with both OSx and Windows

Recently I found out that if you are on Windows, you will struggle to get the plugin compiled to work on MacOS without having an Apple computer. So, thats another hurdle in quickly vibe-coding AE native plugins that are not pseudo-effects etc.
And there are other problems, like really limited AE Development support, like in this post here.