Video Production Is an Orchestration Problem: Lessons From a 34,000-Star Open-Source Agentic System
Most agentic AI aims at developers. This talk points it at work with no developers at all — producing video — and treats it as what it really is: an orchestration problem. OpenMontage is an open-source multi-agent system (12 pipelines, 52 tools, 34,000+ GitHub stars) that turns a single prompt into a finished, edited video. I'll go past the demo into the architecture that makes autonomy reliable: single-responsibility "stage director" agents coordinating through a durable artifact-and-checkpoint contract on disk instead of fragile conversation state. I'll be honest about what didn't work — the mega-prompt monolith, coordinating agents through chat history — and why each failed, then take a real run from prompt to finished video live on stage. You'll leave with a concrete, reusable blueprint for orchestrating multi-stage agentic work in your own domain, developer or not.