Built 11 GPU VFX effects in one evening. Zero C++ experience.

Screen recording attached.

CRUSH_ is a hardware-accelerated visual effects plugin for DaVinci Resolve. 11 glitch, warp, and distortion effects running on Apple Metal. Pixel sorting. Datamoshing. VHS tracking. A compute rasteriser that turns depth maps into 3D point clouds. Real-time.

I'm a creative director who edits video. I've never written Metal Shading Language or C++ before this.

Three things made it possible:

MWP (Model Workspace Protocol) — my orchestration framework. Folder structure as logic. Each stage has one job, one config, one review gate. Six stages, no drift. The AI doesn't freestyle.
Claude — did the building. Wrote the format spec, the code generator, the plugin core, and every shader. When the architecture is already defined, it executes.
Gemini Deep Research — did the homework. Metal API constraints. OFX property flags. Atomic operations for the compute rasteriser. Structured technical references that fed directly into the build configs.

The system around the AI is the intelligence. Not the AI itself.

I didn't prompt my way to a plugin. I built a pipeline that decomposes "make 11 GPU effects" into stages small enough that an LLM can't drift. The architecture decisions, the review gates, the taste layer. That's the job.

The AI writes the code. I build the system that makes the code worth writing.

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