Katto is now agent-first: clip from one prompt (app, CLI, MCP & API)

A year ago, turning a two-hour podcast into a week of shorts meant sitting in a dashboard, scrubbing, cropping, captioning, and exporting — one clip at a time. That's a tool. A tool needs a person clicking.

An agent is different. You give it a plain-language goal — "clip yesterday's webinar, caption it, and schedule three shorts this week at 9am" — and it runs the whole pipeline: find the strongest moments, write captions, reframe to 9:16, and schedule to your platforms. No manual selection.

Katto has run that pipeline for a while. What's new is that the same agent now lives everywhere you work — and today we're closing the last gap with a command-line interface.

Four surfaces, one agent

• The app — paste a URL, get scored, captioned, reframed clips.
• MCP — connect Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, VS Code or Windsurf to the hosted server at mcp.katto.tech. One-click OAuth 2.1 (no API key stored in the client), or an sk_live_ key on the same URL.
• REST API — a versioned /v1 with async enqueue, scoped keys, idempotency, and HMAC-signed webhooks.
• CLI (new) — run the pipeline from your terminal or a cron job.

The same account, the same monthly video quota, shared 1:1 across all four. No separate "agent" billing, no opaque credits.

The CLI, in 30 seconds

npm i -g katto-cli          # installs the `katto` command
katto login                 # paste your sk_live_ key (stored locally, chmod 600)

katto clip https://youtu.be/… --clips 5 --wait
katto clips <job-id>        # the finished clip URLs

Every submit sends an idempotency key automatically, so a retried command never creates a duplicate job. Add --json to any command to pipe it into a script. Prefer a chat window? katto mcp prints the config to point Claude or Cursor at the same account.

That's the whole point: a recurring job — the same weekly webinar, the same output format — shouldn't depend on one person remembering to click export. From a script, a cron, or an assistant, it just runs.

Why build for agents that ship

Being reachable by an agent isn't enough; the surface has to be safe to automate against. Katto's API was built for that from day one:

• Idempotency keys — retry a submit safely.
• Scoped API keys — read/write least-privilege, revocable, usage-metered.
• Signed webhooks — HMAC-SHA256, timestamped, SSRF-validated, so you know a job finished without polling.
• Hosted MCP over OAuth 2.1 — zero-install, and your key never touches the client's disk.

Try it

Point your agent at Katto — from the app, the CLI, the MCP server, or the REST API. It's free to start, and the same account works across all four.

→ See the clipping agent

Related: the Katto MCP server & REST API · pricing.