SlideOps: slides from a repo, that tell you when they go stale

Catalog copy, frozen at v1.0.0. The canonical source is glukicov/slideops, which also carries the deck template, the two citation scripts, the reference docs, and the companion slides-to-pdf skill. Install from there; this page summarizes the workflow.

Overview

SlideOps has two jobs, and the second one is the point. Build: turn a repository into a single self-contained HTML slide deck whose every claim came from the code, not from a model's impression of the code. Keep in sync: make that deck able to prove, months later, whether it still matches the repository.

The mechanism joining them is a citation. Every quoted snippet records the file, the line range, and a hash of those source lines at build time, and the deck records the commit it was built from. "Are these slides still accurate?" becomes a command instead of a re-read: a standard-library Python script diffs each citation against the current code and reports CURRENT, MOVED, CHANGED, or MISSING. No model, no network, no tokens, milliseconds to run.

When to Use This Skill

• Use when the user asks for slides, a slide deck, or a presentation about a code repository, one of its subsystems, a feature, or its recent changes: "make slides", "overview deck", "team update slides", "HTML slides for this repo".
• Use when the user asks whether an existing deck still matches the code, or wants one rechecked, refreshed, or kept in sync: "is this deck still accurate", "check the slides against the code", "these docs are stale".
• Use when the user wants deck freshness wired into CI, a pull request check, or an agent hook: "fail the build when the deck stops matching the code".
• Do not use for slide decks about anything other than a codebase (a sales deck, a lecture); the citation mechanism assumes a git repository as the source of truth.

How It Works

Step 1: Install from the canonical repo

In Claude Code, as a plugin (both skills, background updates):

/plugin marketplace add glukicov/slideops
/plugin install slideops@slideops

Or for Codex CLI, Copilot CLI, and OpenCode, one installer covers all of them:

git clone https://github.com/glukicov/slideops && cd slideops
git checkout ba43e89bc7936649be36a1796a62203f704f8c60   # the v1.0.0 release commit
./install.sh

The checkout pins the exact commit this catalog copy froze at, which is what a reader can verify independently. (The canonical repo also blocks retargeting of v* tags with an active tag ruleset, but a SHA does not ask you to trust that.) install.sh symlinks the two skills into ~/.claude/skills (read by Claude Code and OpenCode) and ~/.agents/skills (read by Codex CLI and Copilot CLI).

Step 2: Build a deck

The skill walks a fixed pipeline: a two-minute repo scan, one compact intake (topic, audience, length, theme, scope, extras), an outline checkpoint before any HTML is written, then slide-by-slide construction from a verified template. Every snippet is cited as it is written. Run the citation script from inside the repository being presented, via its installed path (an agent resolves scripts/ against the skill's own directory automatically; the paths below are for running it yourself after install.sh):

python3 ~/.agents/skills/slideops/scripts/cite.py app/main.py:40-58 --repo . --snippet   # prints data-src + data-sha256
python3 ~/.agents/skills/slideops/scripts/cite.py --stamp deck.html --repo .             # stamps the build commit

--repo always points at the repository the deck is about, never at the SlideOps checkout.

Every slide is then rendered with headless Chrome and visually verified before the deck is considered done.

Step 3: Check it later, for free

From inside the repository being presented, same path convention as Step 2:

python3 ~/.agents/skills/slideops/scripts/check.py docs/slides/ --repo .

Real output, from the demo deck that ships with the skill:

Deck: skill-demo.html
Built: commit=179bbdb date=2026-08-28 repo=slideops

  slide   9  THEMING        skills/slideops/assets/template.html:22-45    CURRENT
  slide  14  MERMAID        skills/slideops/references/diagrams.md:55-59  CURRENT

2 current, 0 stale, 2 cited in total.

MOVED means only line numbers shifted (update two attributes, leave the prose). CHANGED means the quoted code was edited (read the diff, decide whether the slide's claim survived). MISSING means the file is gone (the slide is probably obsolete). The --json flag emits a complete repair brief per stale citation, so an agent can fix drift without re-reading the repository.

Examples

Example 1: New deck

User: make slides about this repo
Agent: [scans repo, proposes 3-4 concrete topics with a "why now" each,
        asks one compact intake, shows an outline, then builds and
        visually verifies a cited HTML deck at docs/slides/]

Example 2: Freshness check in CI

python3 tools/slideops-check.py docs/slides/ --repo . --exit-zero   # report-only PR annotation

The canonical repo's references/automation.md has the PR-check workflow, advisory hook variants, and a delegated-refresh recipe. check.py is one dependency-free file, meant to be vendored into the deck's own repo.

Best Practices

• ✅ Cite with cite.py, never by hand: a hand-computed hash silently reports CHANGED months later and nobody can tell whether the code moved or the build was sloppy.
• ✅ Repair a drifted deck; do not rebuild it. Fix only the slides whose citations went stale, then re-stamp.
• ✅ Automate the check for evergreen decks (onboarding, architecture); leave snapshots (sprint updates, conference talks) frozen deliberately.
• ❌ Do not run check.py against a PDF export: citations live in the HTML, so the PDF reports "No citations found in this deck".
• ❌ Do not block every commit on the check. Report-only on pull requests first; a docs gate on the fast path trains people to pass --no-verify.

Limitations

• Needs a headless Chrome or Chromium binary (Playwright cache or system install) for the visual verification pass, and Python 3 for the citation scripts.
• Works offline except two opt-ins: Mermaid diagrams (a one-time npx download) and brand-color extraction from a live style guide.
• The check verifies quoted snippets against the code; it cannot verify prose claims that cite nothing.
• Drift detection assumes the deck and the code share a git repository.

Security & Safety Notes

• Ask before cloning the upstream repository, running install.sh, creating skill symlinks in the user's home directory, downloading an optional npx package, or writing deck output. Show the exact pinned commit and destination paths first, and preserve any existing skill entries instead of overwriting them silently.
• The citation scripts are standard-library-only Python: no dependencies, no network, no tokens.
• The skill declares no allowed-tools, deliberately: the host agent's own permission model stays in charge, and headless Chrome keeps its sandbox.
• The skill carries an explicit confidentiality rule for deck content: never read or quote secrets, keys, .env files, production logs, or customer data; redact internal hostnames and identifiers; and finish with a redaction scan of the rendered slides, because decks are documents that leave the repository.
• File writes are limited to the deck output folder (default docs/slides/) plus its companion README.

Common Pitfalls

• Problem: check.py on an exported PDF reports no citations. Solution: Run it against the HTML deck; the PDF is a derived artifact from the companion slides-to-pdf skill.
• Problem: A freshly built deck already reports CHANGED. Solution: That is a build defect, not a future problem: a snippet was quoted and then edited, or a hash was hand-computed. Re-cite with cite.py before shipping.
• Problem: Chrome is not found on the verification step. Solution: The canonical repo's references/verification.md has the cross-platform discovery recipe (Playwright cache first, then system installs).

Related Skills

• slides-to-pdf (same canonical repo): screenshots every slide at 2x, prints a page-per-slide PDF, and verifies the result by rendering the PDF back to images.
• @2slides-ppt-generator: API-driven deck generation from text or documents; use it when the source material is not a code repository.