The Deck Was the Easy Part

Recently I gave a talk to product and engineering leaders at a large company. I always like talking to smart people about the future of work and AI tooling. I loved that putting the actual deck together was relatively easy. I had to figure out what I wanted to talk about and the narrative, of course, but the visuals took only as much time as they needed to.

I almost just told that story and left it there. The good-news version, AI builds your slides now. But when I dug into why it actually worked, it wasn't really about slides. It's that I've put together a stack I can work with agentically. I prioritize tools and formats I can hand to an agent. I wanted to tell the story of the magic. But AI on its own only gets you the easy win. The leverage shows up when there's a system for it to work inside. That system is the real story.

Go back a few years and a deck was two jobs, not one. You'd write the narrative, then climb out of it to go be a part-time designer. You damn near had to be one. Slides that illustrate and scaffold the talk without distracting from it. If you couldn't pull that off, the talk was garbage, because everyone was too distracted by your kindergarten visuals to hear it. You'd have been better off in crayon. At least that looks deliberate. And before any of the design, there was the scavenger hunt. The company template. Recreating the company style when you couldn't find it. A quote out of one doc, a number out of another, a chart out of a third.

None of that happened this time, because every piece the deck needed was already somewhere an agent could reach, and verify against rather than invent. These are the elements of my stack, the things I can actually work with in Claude Code or Codex.

1. My writing. I write about the things I present on, constantly. The narrative for almost any talk already exists in pieces across my work. I point Claude at all of my writing, have it pull the most connected pieces and the supporting points, and I start from a scaffold instead of a blank page. All of my writing is locally accessible in markdown files in Obsidian.
2. My research. As I come across good articles and posts from smart people in the space and from business leaders, I file them into a collection. So when I need a real number, or an example of how someone else is actually doing the work, it's already sitting there. I'm not scrambling the night before.
3. My formats. My world is text. Markdown, HTML, JavaScript. That sounds incidental and isn't. AI-generated decks fight with PowerPoint and Keynote, and the moment you're locked to those formats the whole thing gets harder. Mine never touched them.
4. My design language. My brand guidelines, my site, my newsletter, all of it sits where an agent can reach it. So the slides came out looking like my work instead of a generic template. Nothing to find, nothing to recreate.
5. My focus. What I care about is the storytelling. I want people focused on what I'm saying and the points I'm making, so the slides carry the story instead of competing with it. Solid, on brand, in service of the narrative. Keeping the bar there is exactly what makes the whole thing safe to hand off.

Put those together and the deck assembled itself out of materials that were already mine, in formats I could already touch. I got to stay in the one place that was ever the point, the narrative, while the busywork happened around me. I, of course, had to write, edit and refine. But I got to focus on the important parts.

Even the presentation was HTML. The slides rendered as images and I stepped through them in a webpage with the arrow keys. No export, no import, no translating the talk into someone else's format at the very end. The whole path, from the thinking to the thing on the screen, stayed in formats I own.

The stack isn't the whole reason it worked, though. I live this topic. If you don't, the narrative is the work, and that's the part AI can't do for you. It will happily fill in illustrations and examples. It cannot decide what you're actually trying to say. So if I were advising someone else, I'd flip the order. Get the high-resolution version out of your head first. Talk it out, transcribe it, whatever it takes. Then let AI go from high resolution to low. It's great at down-converting and filling in once the vision is clear. It can generate all day. It just can't tell YOUR story.

If you can keep your work where an agent can reach it, then the busywork stops pulling you out of the thinking. The what is still yours. You just get to spend more of your time there.

Related

• The substance of the talk these slides were for: 99% Adoption and Still Stuck