Stages AI updates CUE Direct with a 63/70 internal eval

• According to the 7-dimension eval post, Stages AI says CUE Direct scored 63/70 on an internal rubric covering cross-surface autonomy, project memory, consistency refs, semantic editing, model coverage, autonomy control, and live narration.
• In the CUE Direct preview, Stages frames the tool as a studio-wide director that lives in chat, moves across the product's surfaces, narrates its actions, and keeps project memory intact.
• The AGENTIX preview and the STAGES Pro homepage point to the same workflow split: AGENTIX handles node and canvas orchestration, while CUE sits above it as the command layer for planning, routing, and delivery.
• In the CUE Chat demo, Dustin Thornton shows image-to-storyboard prompting that outputs scripts and shot lists for a long list of video models, including Seedance 2, Kling, Veo, Runway, Hailuo, LTX, and others.
• The public product page at STAGES Pro already lists Version 1.0.1 Alpha, BYOK pricing from free to enterprise, and a 52-route toolchain, while a follow-up post adds that v1.02 is planned to include stem separation.

You can browse the live STAGES Pro site, read NAKID's earlier product architecture post, and check the public beta signup page. The homepage quietly exposes a much larger route map than the launch tweets, including /chat, /storyboard, /video-generation, /audio-studio, /gaussian-splat, and /local-models on the same surface. Thornton's tweets also add two roadmap crumbs that were not in the main thread: a 3D MoCap and digital studio in progress and stem separation for v1.02.

Stages is pitching CUE Direct as the layer that keeps a project coherent while it jumps across tools. The most concrete detail is the eval rubric itself, which is more useful than the headline score.

• Cross-surface autonomy
• Project memory
• Consistency refs
• Semantic editing
• Model coverage
• Pro tool agentic autonomy control
• Live narration

In the CUE Direct preview, Thornton says the agent lives in chat, navigates the entire studio, generates across every surface, narrates each move, and remembers the project as it grows. The STAGES Pro homepage matches that framing with a "CUE Orchestrator" section that describes one intelligence layer for planning, generation, orchestration, and delivery across 52 connected routes and 11 capability domains.

The tweets separate CUE from AGENTIX in a way the site makes easier to parse. The AGENTIX demo describes autonomous node design and building with human-in-the-loop choices through chat.

The homepage turns that into product structure:

• STAGE: the infinite canvas where ideas, assets, and direction stay in one visual system, per STAGES Pro
• AGENTIX: the autonomous crew inside that canvas, routing vision, audio, and QA agents in real time, per STAGES Pro
• CUE: the command layer above the toolchain, with context intelligence, multimodal routing, action governance, memory, and an intake-to-delivery execution loop, per STAGES Pro

That lines up with the April NAKID launch post, which described STAGES as a creative OS with CUE as the orchestration layer and Agentix as the custom workflow layer.

The most creator-friendly demo in the thread is the chat storyboard flow. In the CUE Chat post, Thornton says a single image prompt like "give me shots for a cult classic vibe around this image" can produce a script, storyboard, and prompt set while the user works elsewhere in the studio.

The model list matters because it shows how broad the routing layer is supposed to be. That same post names:

• Dreamina Seedance 2
• Alibaba HH1
• Imagine
• Kling
• WAN
• Hailuo
• Veo
• Luma
• Runway
• Vidu
• Lightricks LTX

The thread wrap adds four more surfaced features inside STAGES:

• Portfolios
• Account customization
• STAGE Canvas Moodboard
• Node Writer
• Generate Everything hub

The live product page says STAGES Pro is at Version 1.0.1 Alpha and already exposes five paid tiers plus a free plan, with BYOK support for providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Runway, Hailuo, Replicate, and Hugging Face on the pricing section. It also lists routes for /audio-studio, /daw, /marketplace, /gaussian-splat, and /local-models, which makes this look closer to a creative suite than a single-agent wrapper.

Thornton added two near-term product notes outside the main launch thread: one follow-up post says v1.01 was done and v1.02 will add stem separation, while another post says he is building a fully 3D MoCap and digital studio inside STAGES and is nearly done with a tutorial video library. The public stages-ai.io site still frames access as a beta signup, so the launch signal here is not full public release. It is an unusually wide alpha surface, with pricing and route inventory already visible.