beautiful_deck

Beautiful Deck (/beautiful_deck)

End-to-end beautiful deck creation, from blank slate to audited, compiled PDF with accompanying scripts for students.

/beautiful_deck is the operational version of the deck-generation prompt that used to live at presentations/deck_generation_prompt.md. Rather than re-pasting the prompt each time, invoke the skill.

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What it does

/beautiful_deck is the full pipeline:

1. Triage — gathers the audience, content source, aesthetic path, code language, output format, and one-sentence takeaway before touching any slides.
2. Design an original theme — builds a custom .sty or preamble tuned to the audience. Never boilerplate. A reader should not be able to guess what theme package is underneath.
3. Design the narrative arc — writes a one-page outline enforcing the pedagogical movement Narrative → Application → Picture → Codeblock → Technical. Shows the outline to the user for approval before writing any slides.
4. Generate figures and tables code-first — writes standalone R / Python / Stata scripts, runs them, saves figures and tables, and only then writes the \includegraphics{} and \input{} calls in the deck.
5. Write the slides — one idea per slide, assertion titles, no wall of sentences, MB/MC equivalence across the deck, and safe TikZ generation from the start (Step 4.4 — see below).
6. Compile and fix warnings — runs the compile loop until Overfull, Underfull, font, and fatal errors all return zero counts.
7. Run /tikz — invokes the measurement-based visual collision audit to catch any residual TikZ collisions. Because Step 5 writes safe TikZ from the start, /tikz is a check, not a rescue mission.
8. Rhetoric audit (second agent) — dispatches a sub-agent to verify titles-are-assertions, one-idea-per-slide, MB/MC balance, narrative arc, Devil's Advocate presence, and audience fit.
9. Graphics audit (third agent) — dispatches a second sub-agent focused only on numerical accuracy of figures/tables, label positioning, axis coherence, color consistency, and font sizing.
10. Final compile — recompiles to a clean state and delivers.

Why the pedagogical movement matters

The single most important rule in this skill is the ordering:

Narrative → Application → Picture → Codeblock → Technical

Every section, every slide sequence, every topic must move in this order. Not the reverse.

The anti-pattern is the lecture that opens with definitions, proves a theorem, and then offers an example at the end "for intuition." That treats technical content as primary and intuition as decorative. Scott's pedagogy is the opposite: the intuition is the content, and the technical statement is what the audience walks away with, not what they walk in with.

The skill enforces this at every slide-sequencing step. If the agent catches itself writing a technical slide before the picture that motivates it, it backs up and writes the picture first.

Why an original theme matters

Aristotle's principle of ethos (credibility) is partially visual. An audience that sees a default Beamer theme in the first five seconds has already scored the speaker lower on preparation and care. An original, audience-tuned aesthetic earns back the attention budget before the first content slide arrives.

The skill requires:

• Beamer default — a custom .sty file or inline preamble fully styled.
• Theme packages as foundation, not as identity — you may build on top of metropolis, moloch, focus, beamerposter, etc. for sane spacing defaults, but you MUST override colors, fonts, frame-title style, title slide, and bullets enough that the result is visually unrecognizable as the source theme.
• No defaults shipped — under no circumstances should the deck land in Scott's hands with boilerplate styling.

For alternative formats (Quarto, reveal.js, Typst), the same rule applies — custom CSS, custom style blocks, overridden defaults.

TikZ Generation Defaults (Step 4.4) — Prevention Over Repair

This is the most consequential addition to the skill. Previously, /beautiful_deck generated TikZ however it liked — autosized nodes, edge labels without directional keywords, no coordinate planning — and relied on /tikz (Step 7) to repair the collisions afterward. That pipeline was broken: /tikz is a repair tool, not a safety net, and it cannot reliably fix diagrams that were never built with measurement in mind.

Step 4.4 fixes this upstream. Every TikZ diagram generated by /beautiful_deck now follows five rules:

Rule	What it prevents
1. Explicit node dimensions — every \node declares minimum width and minimum height	Autosized boxes make arrow endpoints unpredictable; downstream collisions become unfixable
2. Directional keywords on every edge label — above, below, left, right, sloped, anchor=, pos=, or midway required	Labels without keywords render ON the arrow line
3. Coordinate map comment before every tikzpicture — a commented block listing every node name, its coordinates, and intended dimensions	Forces spatial planning before drawing; makes /tikz audit passes faster and more reliable
4. Canonical templates for DAGs, flow charts, and RDD threshold diagrams	Known-safe skeletons instead of ad-hoc generation
5. Never use scale on a complex diagram	scale shrinks coordinates but not text, creating invisible collisions where the math looks correct but the rendered output is broken. Redesign at the intended size instead.
6. Never define parameterized styles inside a Beamer frame	#1 inside a frame body is consumed by Beamer's argument parser before TikZ sees it, causing "Illegal parameter number" errors that cascade and resist all downstream fixes. Define all parameterized styles in the preamble with \tikzset{}.

Why Rule 5 matters especially. The scale=0.55 pattern — shrinking a large TikZ figure to fit a Beamer column — was the #1 source of label collisions in Scott's decks. The TikZ coordinates compress but font sizes do not, so a label that "should" be 1.5 units from another label is actually only 0.8 cm away, and the text is still rendered at native size. The collision is invisible in the source code and invisible to /tikz unless it compensates for the scale factor (which it often fails to do). Rule 5 eliminates the entire failure class by forbidding the pattern.

The pipeline is now: prevention (Step 4.4) → compile (Step 5) → residual repair (Step 7, /tikz). Most collisions should never be generated in the first place.

The circuit breaker (Step 5)

If the same compile error persists after 3 different fix attempts, stop editing and tell the user. Quote the error, list what you tried, and ask how to proceed. The cost of asking is 2 minutes. The cost of spiraling is an hour of edits that make the file progressively worse. Every failed fix introduces new problems that obscure the original error. This rule overrides "recompile until clean" — zero tolerance for warnings does not mean infinite attempts.

The Three Laws (inherited from Rhetoric of Decks)

1. Beauty is function. Beauty in presentation is clarity made visible. Decoration without function is noise.
2. Cognitive load is the enemy. One idea per slide. Two max for inseparable contrasts.
3. The slide serves the spoken word. If your slides can be understood without you speaking, you have written a document and called it a presentation.

The Aristotelian triad

The rhetorical balance changes with audience. The skill's triage step (Q2) commits to a specific balance before any slides are written.

Audience	Logos	Ethos	Pathos
Academic seminar (PhD-level, research talk)	50%	40%	10%
Teaching lecture	45%	20%	35%
Conference presentation (20 min)	50%	35%	15%
Working deck (coauthors / future self)	60%	30%	10%
External non-academic (policy, media, industry)	30%	25%	45%

Usage

/beautiful_deck

with optional argument pointing to content:

/beautiful_deck path/to/lecture_notes.md
/beautiful_deck "restructure the deck in decks/2024_seminar/ for an undergraduate audience"
/beautiful_deck "a 20-minute conference presentation on the CBS continuous DiD paper, aimed at applied microeconomists"

The skill will ask clarifying questions if anything in the triage step is missing.

Output structure

<deck_name>/
├── <deck_name>.tex          # Main Beamer source (or .qmd / .typ / .html for alternative formats)
├── <deck_name>.pdf          # Compiled deck (clean)
├── <deck_name>_outline.md   # The approved outline
├── preamble.tex             # If the preamble is factored out
├── scripts/
│   ├── figure_1.R           # Standalone, runnable by students
│   └── ...
├── figures/
│   ├── figure_1.pdf
│   └── ...
└── tables/
    ├── table_1.tex          # LaTeX fragment
    └── ...

Related skills

• /compiledeck — the mechanical compile loop and preamble templates. /beautiful_deck calls this for compile mechanics and palette references rather than duplicating them.
• /tikz — the measurement-based TikZ collision audit. Invoked during the visual cleanup step.
• /referee2 — the full five-audit protocol. /beautiful_deck uses a rhetoric-scoped variant of it in the audit step.
• /split-pdf — if the source content is a paper Scott is reading, split it first and work from the summaries.

The philosophy behind it

Full essays:

• presentations/rhetoric_of_decks.md — the operational principles
• presentations/rhetoric_of_decks_full_essay.md — the 600-line intellectual genealogy from Aristotle through LLMs

/beautiful_deck is the operational skill version of those essays. You don't need to re-read them to invoke it — the skill handles the workflow — but the essays explain why the principles work.