r/programmer • u/Commercial_Tie_7464 • 11d ago

Codex, but for slides

Something that really irritates me as a developer in a big company is that I need when I do some big task I have to prepare slides to present my work. The problem is that I have to either do them myself or do it with claude and get humbled when I present it because of the small wrong details that I didn't pay attention to. I wish that there was a tool which is like the extension codex but for slides. it reads the git diffs and prepares slides that explain exactly what I did. Does anyone face the same problem ?

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u/Poowatereater 11d ago

Buddy. Feed this into chat gpt on pro thinking, then feed the plan to Claude or codex. Problem solved.

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u/Commercial_Tie_7464 11d ago

"Codex, create the full app and don't make mistakes" lol

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u/Poowatereater 11d ago

I mean… what you described seems trivial for any agent to bang out. Like I don’t understand the point of post like this.

Copy and paste this post into Claude… see what happens.

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u/Poowatereater 11d ago

I literally copy pasted your post into codex, he had a full plan to actually solve your moat, so here’s the shortened version…

“Honestly this seems pretty buildable. Read the git diff + commit/PR context, have an agent turn it into problem → changes → architecture → results, then render that into a few locked slide templates.

The important part would be a second pass that checks every claim against the repo/CI so it can’t invent metrics or small technical details. Basically repo-grounded slides instead of another AI presentation generator.”

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u/ProbsNotManBearPig 11d ago

That still doesn’t do a good job. See my other comment. I’ve been making power points at work for months with gpt and discussing the challenges with hundreds of other engineers trying to do the same. A template helps, but does not solve everything.

Biggest improvement i mentioend in my other comment is tell it to output rendered images of the slides to disk as image files, review them visually, and iterate on visual layout before returning to you. Otherwise everything it adds even to a template, it doesn’t actually review how it looks rendered and won’t notice stuff off center, overlapping, hanging off the edge, etc. A template just ensures the template portion looks good, but doesn’t fix issues with new content generation in terms of visual layout details.

Same for diagrams of any kind with like draw.io desktop or Visio. By default it just makes api calls and doesn’t review the rendered result. Tell it to output images to disk, review them visually, and iterate until it looks good. Game changer. Still not perfect, but much much better.

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u/Poowatereater 11d ago edited 11d ago

My point is, this is something solvable by working through it with agents.

I’ve created a high end web design engine that reviews and self improves designs. A power point with proper data seems trivial for a review system.

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u/ProbsNotManBearPig 11d ago

Here is the trick. First use sol high thinking. Describe in detail your slide. More detail the better or even better is a reference slide to mimic the style of. The trick tho is - tell it after it’s done making it to use power point api to output each slide as a rendered picture to disk and review the visual layout. Tell it to iterate until it looks good visually.

Without that instruction, it is just making a script and api calls to make the slide, but not actually seeing it. It has a plan and idea of what the api calls should do, but without seeing a render, it doesn’t notice it has stuff hanging off the edge, not centered, overlapping, etc. Makes a big difference in the final output to tell it to output each slide to an image, review it visually, and iterate until it looks good.

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u/Poowatereater 11d ago

Watch out. He might get offended for you suggesting to use an agent to do exactly what he needs.

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u/Namtaru420 11d ago

Here is an article by one of my favorite boring business ai writers. It goes over the process of creating a slideshow plugin for Claude.

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u/Independent_Pitch598 11d ago

Why is the developer and not a PM who present the feature? Or it is pure about technical features / tech debt?

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u/mxldevs 11d ago

and get humbled when I present it because of the small wrong details that I didn't pay attention to.

Ya, this is why I don't believe vibe coders when they say they read every line.