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Comment by beklein | Hacker News Reader

I love this! I use coding agents to generate web-based slide decks where “master slides” are just components, and we already have rules + assets to enforce corporate identity. With content + prompts, it’s straightforward to generate a clean, predefined presentation. What I’d really want on top is an “improv mode”: during the talk, I can branch off based on audience questions or small wording changes, and the system proposes (say) 3 candidate next slides in real time. I pick one, present it, then smoothly merge back into the main deck. Example: if I mention a recent news article / study / paper, it automatically generates a slide that includes a screenshot + a QR code link to the source, then routes me back to the original storyline. With realtime voice + realtime code generation, this could turn the boring old presenter view into something genuinely useful.

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I love the probabilistic nature of this. Presentations could be anywhere from extremely impressive to hilariously embarrassing.

It would be so cool if it generated live in the presentation and adjusted live as you spoke, so you’d have to react to whatever popped on screen!

Every presentation becomes improv

Isn't that such a great outcome. No more robotic presentations. The best part is that you can now practice Improv at the comfort of your home.

And this product will work great for any industry... can I get a suggestion for an industry from the crowd?

Audience: Transportation... Education... Insurance...

Speaker: Great! I heard "Healthcare".

Right... as we can see from this slide, this product fits the "Healthcare" industry great because of ...

Caro’s first LBJ biography tells of how the future president became a congressman in Texas in his 20s, by carting around a “claque” of his friends to various stump speeches and having them ask him softball questions and applauding loudly after

Well, hey, who needs friends?

I had a butterfly take over my live DreamScape slide show demo at the 1995 WWDC.

https://youtu.be/5NytloOy7WM?t=321

Some consulting firms do this, one guy is giving the presentation live while others are in the next meeting room still banging out the slides.

There was a pre-LLM version of this called "battledecks" or "PowerPoint Karaoke"[0] where a presenter is given a deck of slides they've never seen and have to present on it. With a group of good public speakers it can be loads of fun (and really impressive the degree that some people can pull it off!)

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPoint_karaoke

There is a Jackbox game called "Talking Points" that's like this: the players come up with random ideas for presentations, your "assistant" (one of the other players) picks what's on each slide while you present: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKnprQpQONw

That is very cool. Thanks for posting this - I think I’m going to put on a PowerPoint karaoke night. This will rule! :)

If you like this, search on YouTube for "Harry Mack". Mindblowing

and with neuralink it would generate slides of the audience naked

That would make a great Wii game.

PowerPoint Hero.

I guess you could have two people per presentation, one person who confirms whether to slide in the generated slide or maybe regenerate. And then of course, eventually that's just an agent

You're describing almost verbatim what we're building at Octigen [1]! Happy to provide a demo and/or give you free access to our alpha version already online.

[1] https://octigen.com

Claude Code is pretty good at making slides already. What’s your differentiator?

* ability to work with your own PowerPoint native templates; none of the AI slide makers I've seen have any competency in doing that.

* ability to integrate your corporate data.

* repeatable workflows for better control over how your decks look like.

As an associate professor who spends a ridiculous amount of time preparing for lectures, I would love to try this in one of my courses

Try Claude Code too. It’s surprisingly good at this.

I built something similar at a hackathon, a dynamic teleprompter that adjusts the speed of tele-prompting based on speaker tonality and spoken wpm. I can see extending the same to an improv mode. This is a super cool idea.

Can you show one?

The end result would be a normal PPT presentation, check https://sli.dev as an easy start, ask Codex/Claude/... to generate the slides using that framework with data from something.md. The interesting part here is generating these otherwise boring slide decks not with PowerPoint itself but with AI coding agents and a master slides, AGENTS.md context. I’ll be showing this to a small group (normally members only) at IPAI in Heilbronn, Germany on 03/03. If you’re in the area and would like to join, feel free to send me a message I will squeeze you in.

How do you handle the diagrams?

In my AGENTS.md file i have a _rule_ that tells the model to use Apache ECharts, the data comes from the prompt and normally .csv/.json files. Prompt would be like: "After slide 3 add a new content slide that shows a bar chart with data from @data/somefile.csv" ... works great and these charts can be even interactive.

What about other ad hoc diagrams like systems architecture, roadmaps, mind maps, etc.

These are the bane of any staff engineers life - lol. Because people above need to know a plan in art form.

So seriously interested on how I can make it easier

You could try something like mermaid (or ASCII) -> nano banana. You can also go the other way and turn images into embedded diagrams (which can be interactive depending on how you're sharing the presentation)

Not my normal use-case, but you can always fall back and ask the AI coding agent to generate the diagram as SVG, for blocky but more complex content like your examples it will work well and still is 100% text based, so the AI coding agents or you manually can fix/adjust any issues. An image generation skill is a valid fallback, but in my opinion it's hard to change details (json style image creation prompts are possible but hard to do right) and you won't see changes nicely in the git history. In your use case you can ask the AI coding agent to run a script.js to get the newest dates for the project from a page/API, then it should only update the dates in the roadmap.svg file on slide x with the new data. This way you will automagically have the newest numbers and can track everything within git in one prompt. Save this as a rule in AGENTS.md and run this every month to update your slides with one prompt.

Claude code can output Excalidraw format files which can be imported directly into the webapp. You can MCP it too if you want.

I have it do svgs.

The layout isn't always great on first shot, but you iterate on that.

They can also natively generate e.g. github markdown mermaid diagrams (github markdown has a lot of extensions like that)

I love the idea of a living slide deck. This feels like a product that needs to exist!

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