A digital medium environment includes an asset processing application that performs editing of assets. A projection function is trained using pairs of actions pertaining to software edits, and assets resulting from the actions to learn a joint embedding between the actions and the assets. The projection function is used in the asset processing application to recommend software actions to create an asset, and also to recommend assets to demonstrate the effects of software actions. Recommendations are based on ranking distance measures that measure distances between actions representations and asset representations in a vector space.