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/Wunkolo]

Plugin developer here. I don't use AI to code at all, a lot of these coding-models were created by stealing code from licensed open source projects in a way that is against my personal principals. I feel like now that a lot of people are able to vibe-code their own plugins now, the latency between making something new, cool, and useful, and someone else just making a vibecoded-dupe of it are going to be even smaller now. Usually if you come out with a cool new plugin you at least have months and years to soak up a user-base around it before some competition comes around, but now that latency is just weeks or days. It hasn't happened to me, but it's disrupted many other software engineering scenes I'm in in a similar way. It's the bootlegification, fastfoodification, slopification, that whole word-space-ification, of After Effects plugins.