u/Scary-Vanilla-4597

Been running paid social for a few ecom brands the past 4 months, and I've tested way too many AI video tools trying to find the magic one that does everything.

Stopped doing that. Now I run a stack of 5 tools — each handles one job — and our ad output went from 5–6 variants/week to 30+, without the work feeling like slop.

Here's the stack and how it fits together.

1. ChatGPT / Claude — scripts and angle variations

Where every ad starts. I write the hook, the script outline, and 5–10 angle variations here before touching any video tool.

Pro tip: I feed it 3–4 winning ads from my swipe file as reference + a short brand voice doc. The output is way sharper than zero-shot prompts. The first version is usually mid; the second one after I tell it what's wrong is almost always usable.

2. Nano Banana Pro — clean product / hero images

My go-to for product shots and avatar-style setups. Way faster than firing up Photoshop or hiring a 1099 designer for a single image.

Pro tip: generate a clean product shot here first, then take that into a video tool to animate. Skipping the "good static input" step is where most AI video gets that off, kind-of-melted feeling. Garbage in, garbage out applies hard.

Downside: it doesn't do video itself. So pair it with something that animates.

3. AdsTurbo — main ad creative loop

This is where most of our actual ad volume gets made. We use it for two things:

• Cloning a winning ad structure. Paste the URL of a competitor's ad (or our own past winner), and it spits out 5–8 variants with similar pacing/hook but different visuals. Last month I dropped in a 30-second TikTok ad that was crushing on a client account, got 6 variants in maybe 20 minutes, and 2 ended up in the active rotation.
• Turning a product page URL into a UGC-style video ad. Feed the product page, get a draft ad with avatar + script + visuals already roughed in. We use this mostly for new SKUs where there's no winning reference yet.

Pro tip: feed it a winning ad from your own backlog rather than someone else's — the cloning fidelity is way better when there's brand context. Generic competitor-clone outputs feel a half-step off.

Honest take on where it doesn't fit: took me a couple tries to figure out the prompt format for the ad clone feature. And it's not the tool I'd reach for if I needed an original cinematic shot from scratch — it shines on iterating on existing winners, way less on greenfield creative. For that I use #4.

4. Runway — from-scratch cinematic shots

When AdsTurbo can't pull it because there's no winning reference yet — like a brand-new product launch with no ad backlog — Runway handles the from-scratch cinematic shot.

I use it sparingly. Output quality is great but credits drain fast, and honestly the cinematic look isn't always what scrolls best on TikTok or Reels. Most of my testing volume runs through AdsTurbo + a CapCut polish, and the more "edited together by a human" feel actually performs better for cold audiences.

Generation time is also slow vs anything that runs on a structured input (URL, image, existing ad).

5. CapCut — final stitch and polish

The boring but essential last step. I stitch AI-generated b-roll with any real footage, drop on captions, music, and the standard 3-second hook overlay.

Pro tip: auto-captions are decent but always proofread them. They hallucinate brand names. Lost a campaign once because the captions said the wrong product name through the whole video. Embarrassing, very on-brand for AI workflows in 2026.

I’ve been coding for a while and Copilot is still basically my default. It’s just always on and fills in the gaps fast enough. But lately my workflow has been getting more fragmented and I’m not sure if that’s just me? I’ll start something in VS Code with Copilot, then jump into Cursor when things get messy, sometimes switch over to Claude when I need to untangle logic, and occasionally I’ll spin up a quick prototype in something like Atoms ai just to test an idea before committing. It doesn’t really feel like there is a single IDE or tool anymore that covers everything cleanly. Are most of you still sticking to one main IDE with Copilot or similar baked in or has your workflow basically turned into switching AI tools depending on the task? Also wondering if anyone here has actually consolidated their workflow down to one tool?