The AI console is available on every plan, including free Hobby. What limits you is credits, not the plan flag.
What a run costs
5 credits for the first step of a run, then 3 credits for each further step. Most requests finish in one step. A long, ambitious brief takes several and is charged for each of them.
On the free plan's 40 credits a month, that is eight first steps before continuations. That is the real constraint on Hobby, not permission.
Where it lives
The AGENT CONSOLE panel on the right of the editor. For a bigger version with no timeline in the way, use Agent Mode from the three-dot More tools menu. There is also Otto, the character docked near the timeline, who takes the same instructions by text or voice and hands them to the same console, so billing, undo and refunds are identical.
Otto is on by default on desktop, is never shown on mobile, and can be muted, snoozed for 20 minutes, or turned off for good from his own panel. The Otto item in the More tools menu brings him back.
What it can do
Effectively the whole editor. Cuts, trims, captions, colour, effects, transitions, keyframes, audio ducking, resizing to a new aspect ratio, markers, beat syncing and more. It can also see: it captures frames from your real preview and checks its own work against them, which is not plan-gated.
You can put a specialist in front of it by typing @ and a name, for example @colourist or @film-editor. There are 14 of them and you can use up to two in one request. A specialist never touches the timeline itself: it briefs the editing agent on craft and on what a good result looks like.
What it cannot do
- It cannot rewrite the pixels inside a clip. AI clip editing is written but switched off product-wide, so do not expect it to repaint or restyle footage.
- Undo, redo, play, pause and zoom are things you do, not things it does for you.
- Some ops it might name are handled differently: detaching audio, denoising, and overlays are all done with other commands, which it knows.
- Pro effects and filters are stripped from its plan if your plan does not include them, and it will say what it dropped.
- Scripting is Creator and up, image and video generation is Studio, and voiceover is Creator and up.
Why a long run stops
There is a ceiling of roughly two dozen steps per run as a runaway backstop. If you hit it you will see Reached the step limit, ask me to continue for more, or from the server, That run has taken too many steps. Start a new request. Ask it to continue and it picks up.
There is also a per-run budget on generated media of 600 credits, so one request cannot quietly spend a month's allowance.
If it is being throttled
Slow down, too many AI requests. Try again shortly is a rate limit at 20 requests a minute. Wait a moment.