Rebuilding a motion engine in one night with REA and Opus 5.5
The author used REA and Opus 5.5 to take apart a $249 After Effects motion panel and rebuilt its whole motion engine in one evening for $6, sharing the full prompt workflow.
It is becoming f*cking dangerous: I took apart a $249 After Effects panel with REA + Opus 5.5 and rebuilt its whole motion engine in ONE EVENING FOR $6 REA is six months old, built by an anonymous dev who calls himself "member of technically staff", 276,000 stars already. Dario's Opus 5.5 is the brain, REA is the hands No more $2,400 studio quotes, no keyframes by hand, no copying effects by eye The chain is simple: REA reads the panel from your own disk, Opus 5.5 writes the spec, and every line comes with a file and a line number behind it The whole engine turned out to be five settings. Every cell is four numbers, u v w h, where it starts and how big it is. The rule: cut the frame between 30 and 70 percent, cut each half again, stop after 5 cuts, re-cut on every hit of the beat Here is the whole recipe: 1. Find the panel on your disk: A plain app folder, REA reads it with no extra engine 2. Install REA: npx rea-agents@latest setup, then restart Claude Code 3. Hand it to Opus 5.5: "I own this software and I'm studying how its motion engine works. Use REA. Find how the layout cuts the frame and when. Quote file and line. Write SPEC.md: every setting, its range, what it does on screen. Build my own generator from SPEC.md only, no copied code or assets" 4. No panel? Skip REA: Paste the five settings above into Claude Code and ask for a generator with your own clips. 180 lines, one evening 47 minutes and $5.35 for the teardown, 70 cents for the build. Two things REA could not see: how the panel hears the beat and the marble shaders, those I tuned by eye Save this before you renew your next plugin
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