TikTok Creator Brooke Lacey: AI Can Replicate Your Editing Style, But Only If You Already Know What Good Looks Like

Brooke Lacey has more than 290,000 followers on TikTok. Her current video editing workflow goes like this: she finishes recording on her phone, drops the file into a terminal, and about 15 seconds later a finished vertical short with captions, jump cuts, and zooms comes out. No uploading footage, no opening any traditional editing software. Driving this process are three tools—FFmpeg handles audio and video, Whisper does speech-to-text, Python acts as glue—all orchestrated by Claude Code.

The entire editing decision lives in a single TSV text file. Each row defines the start time, end time, shot size, and label for a cut. Once Claude generates this file based on her talking-head content, the same command can produce 15-second, 30-second, and 60-second versions plus a landscape crop from one raw take.

But the truly hard part isn't the toolchain—it's teaching Claude to understand her comedic timing. Not simply cutting silences, but learning the cadence of her voice, the length of the pause before a punchline, the ideal cut point after a word, and which repeated take has the best rhythm. Lacey says encoding this style required deliberate instruction and iteration, not one clever prompt.

She also turned her comment section into an ongoing content brief. After each video, she has Claude Code connect the video with its comments, identify what viewers questioned, debated, or wanted to see next, and generate a list of new ideas grounded in signals from her actual audience.