The PowerPoint app, built for AI agents.
Give your AI agent a slide deck and it will edit it the way you would — open it, make the changes, look at the result, and fix what's off. Without wrecking your template, your brand, or the file itself.
All four work on the same file. Your decks can live in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides — if it saves as .pptx (the world's most common deck format, and all three speak it), hands-on-deck works on it.
§ 01Why AI keeps wrecking decks
Here's the secret every deck app hides from you: a .pptx file is really a zipped folder of hundreds of code files (a format called XML). PowerPoint reads that code and paints the slide. An AI agent doesn't get the painting — it gets the code. Every AI deck disaster you've seen starts right here.
one slide · a title, four bullets, a chart
ten seconds to take in
the same slide · ~2,000 lines of this, per slide
a 20-slide deck ≈ tens of thousands of lines
How most tools work today — including the AI apps' built-in deck ability: the agent unpacks all those files and types its changes directly into the code.
It's slow, it burns through tokens, and one typo can make PowerPoint refuse to open the file. Worst of all: an agent spending its whole attention on writing code has none left for how the slide actually looks.
The other way: throw your file away and generate a fresh one from a description.
The result never matches. Your template, brand fonts, logo placement, image treatments — every decision your designer ever made lives in the original file, and regeneration erases all of it.
You would never edit a deck by rewriting its code. You'd open an application built for the job.
hands-on-deck is that application, built for agents: the agent says what should change, the tool changes it. The code stays the tool's problem — never the agent's, never yours.
§ 02How it works
An AI agent can't drag a text box in PowerPoint — those apps need a mouse and eyes on a screen. But there's one kind of software agents operate masterfully: command-line tools — programs driven by typed instructions. It's the entire reason coding agents like Claude Code and Codex work so well. So we rebuilt the PowerPoint app as one. Here's a real edit, start to finish:
You talk to your agent the way you'd brief a colleague.
The agent writes a short, readable list of changes. This is the entire "program":
Every instruction is checked first — if anything's wrong, nothing is changed. New text keeps the old text's fonts; a swapped image keeps its exact frame.
The tool hands back pictures of the finished slides plus a report of anything that looks off — and the agent fixes what it finds.
The agent never touches the file's code. It states its intent and verifies the outcome; the tool does the bytes. The agent thinks like a designer instead of a programmer — which makes it faster, dramatically cheaper in tokens, and leaves it attention to spare for what actually matters: how the slides look.
§ 03What it can do
Every click and drag you use in PowerPoint has a typed equivalent here. A few of the ~30 operations, translated:
New words, same look — fonts and formatting carry over automatically.
One command covers every slide — including the template itself.
New picture, exact same frame, position, and crop.
Re-theme the entire deck in a couple of commands.
Clone any shape with all its styling; just supply the new text.
Restructure within a deck, or across decks.
The agent designs the slide as a small webpage — the design language it knows best — and the tool converts it into real, editable PowerPoint shapes, placed inside your existing template.
Slides come back as images, with a proofreading report. More below.
Tables, speaker notes, backgrounds, transitions, hidden slides, alt text — covered too. The full command reference lives in the repo; agents pull it up themselves with deck.py docs.
§ 04The safety net
The difference between an AI that makes slides and an AI you can trust with your deck is what happens after the edit. Here, verification is part of the job — not an afterthought.
After every change, slides render to images the agent inspects with its own eyes — the same way you'd flip through a deck before hitting send.
Text spilling out of its box. A shape hanging off the slide. Text hidden behind an image. A box a hair out of line with its neighbors. The tool measures all of it — in exact inches, with the exact fix — and flags only what the latest edit broke.
Every instruction list is verified upfront. One mistake among ten instructions? Zero changes are written, and the agent gets all ten answers at once. You will never open a half-edited deck.
The auto-fixer re-measures after repairing. Anything it couldn't fix is reported, not papered over.
§ 05Make it yours
Because hands-on-deck edits your file instead of regenerating it, everything your designer decided — master slides, layouts, brand fonts, logo placement — survives untouched. Ask for a new slide and it's built from your template's layouts, not a generic default.
That's the biggest difference from "AI deck generators": they make their deck with your words in it. hands-on-deck makes your deck.
Teams don't just need edits — they need edits their way. hands-on-deck is built to be the engine underneath a thin skill of your own: a page of your firm's rules that the agent follows while the engine does the mechanics.
Change your rules anytime without touching the engine — and keep receiving engine improvements automatically.
§ 06Install
hands-on-deck is packaged as an Agent Skill — a folder of instructions and tools any modern AI agent can pick up and use. No server, no account, no API key.
Yes. Save or export as .pptx — both do it cleanly, and Google Slides opens .pptx directly — and hands-on-deck works on it. The file format is the standard; the apps are interchangeable.
It makes the agent think like a designer instead of a programmer. That means faster edits, a fraction of the tokens — and enough spare attention to actually sweat the details on the slide.
No. Install it once — two commands, or one zip upload — then just talk to your agent about your deck. Everything on this page is the agent's job, not yours.
Honestly: native editable charts, shape animations, and embedded video are out of scope — the 5% where you still open PowerPoint yourself. It does the 95% real decks are made of, and says so when it can't.
Built by Every Consulting, distilled from making hundreds of real client decks with AI. Free and open source (MIT) — fork it, extend it, ship it inside your own product.
The GitHub README has the architecture: the patch format, atomic validation, the linter's geometry checks, html2patch, and the eval suite we test against.