Your slides are React source on your machine — a document you and your agent keep working on, slide by slide. Not HTML you regenerate and hope.
npx -y @openpresent/cli studio --open
Generating the first draft is solved. Every model does it, and the result looks convincing in the chat window.
The second draft is where it falls apart. You want to fix one number on slide seven, so you prompt again — and the model hands you a new deck. Different layout, different colors, and the three things you had already fixed by hand are gone. There is nothing to edit, so you re-roll and hope.
OpenPresent makes the deck a document instead of an output:
you double-click the headline, type over it
agent "tighten slides 4 through 6" → edits those three
you undo the second one, keep the rest
tomorrow reopen; the deck and the conversation are both still there
One file, edited repeatedly. Nothing is regenerated to change one thing.
HTML won for good reasons: it is the language models write best, and the browser runs everywhere. But a deck that arrives as one generated artifact inherits four problems.
| Editing means regenerating | Change one figure and the model rewrites everything. Your manual fixes go with it. |
| Nothing carries over | Tomorrow's session has never seen the deck. You re-explain it from scratch, every time. |
| One dead file | A wall of inlined markup nobody can diff, review, or pick up next quarter. |
| Inconsistent by construction | Each regeneration re-rolls the design, so two decks from one team look unrelated. |
A workspace you and your agent share. Click any element to select it, double-click text to edit it. Your edits and the agent's land in the same source, and the slide repaints without reloading, so you keep your place.
Edits stay scoped. Ask for a change to one slide and one slide changes. The agent edits source in place through exact-match, single-occurrence edits, so it cannot quietly rewrite the deck around your request.
The conversation persists. Each presentation remembers its own agent session and resumes it when you come back. Reopening a deck next week does not start from nothing.
Undo reads like actions. "Added metric slide." "Agent: tightened the opening." Step back through them, or jump to any earlier point.
Your agent, your model. Codex, Claude, Gemini, or Kiro — whichever you are already signed into. No API keys to paste, no container to run. Pick the model per presentation.
Approvals you control. Safe in-project edits apply automatically. Destructive ones always ask. Anything reaching outside the folder is refused, not prompted.
npx -y @openpresent/cli studio --openThat is the whole setup. No account, no API key, no Docker. The first run creates a presentation and opens it; after that, the same command reopens whatever you were last working on.
Already have a deck folder? cd into it and run the same command. Want a
specific one? Name it:
openpresent studio ~/Documents/OpenPresent/q3-reviewA presentation is a folder in your Documents, not a project you maintain:
~/Documents/OpenPresent/q3-review/
index.html
src/deck.tsx ← your slides
src/styles.css
No package.json, no lockfile, no node_modules. Studio supplies React and
the build, so your agent never burns its first turn running installs, and you
can move, copy, email, or version the folder like any other document.
And it is readable React, so you are never locked out of your own deck:
<Slide id="evidence" title="The evidence" transition="slide">
<h2>Three signals</h2>
<Grid columns={3}>
<Metric value="3×" label="Faster to review" detail="Median across 40 decks." />
<Metric value="0" label="Cloud dependencies" />
<Metric value="18px" label="Minimum body text" detail="Enforced, not hoped for." />
</Grid>
</Slide>Use a primitive when the pattern repeats. Use plain HTML when the slide is specific to your story. Both are first-class — and both are still there tomorrow, because nothing regenerates them.
OpenPresent ships an MCP server. Point your agent at it and the server starts Studio locally and hands over the authoring loop as tools.
{
"mcpServers": {
"openpresent": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@openpresent/mcp", "--project", "~/Documents/OpenPresent/q3-review", "--open"]
}
}
}| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
get_state, get_outline, get_selection |
Read the deck, the active slide, and the current selection. |
apply_edit |
Guarded source edits: exact match, single occurrence, checkpointed. |
insert_slide, list_slide_templates |
Add one slide or many, with the imports they need. |
capture_slide |
Screenshot a slide so the model can look at its own work. |
validate_deck |
Run the checks, get findings back as structured data. |
undo, redo |
Every change is reversible, by the agent or by you. |
Tools let an agent change a deck. They do not tell it what a good deck is. That ships as a skill you install into the presentation, so the direction travels with the work instead of living in someone's prompt — which is also what keeps the fifteenth slide looking like the first.
npx -y @openpresent/skills claude # .claude/skills in this project
npx -y @openpresent/skills claude-user # every project on this machine
npx -y @openpresent/skills agents # .agents/skills, for Codex and similar
npx -y @openpresent/skills gpt # plain files to upload to a GPTIt lands as a plain Markdown file your agent reads. Edit it, or replace it with your own house style.
The model never sees what it made, so some mistakes survive every draft: a 12px legend, an element off the stage, two things overlapping. The deck gets checked, and findings go back to the agent as data rather than through you.
model.tiny-text warning [charts] Legend text renders at 13px on the logical stage.
Fix: raise to at least 18px so it survives projection.
openpresent validate src/deck.tsx
openpresent validate http://127.0.0.1:4173 --min-font-size 18Every finding carries a rule ID, a severity, the slide, a plain-language message, and a repair hint. It catches text below a readable size, elements off the canvas or overlapping, missing alt text, unreachable controls, and malformed structured data.
Export a self-contained HTML document, to a location you choose. No folder of assets to keep beside it.
deck.tsx ─────────────────────────────────► a document you own
@openpresent/core theme, scale, navigation, transitions
@openpresent/components editorial and technical primitives
@openpresent/validator model rules + browser DOM rules
@openpresent/studio local workspace, agent connectors, library
@openpresent/mcp the authoring loop as agent tools
@openpresent/cli create, dev, build, validate, studio
Packages flow one way: components depend on core, cli on validator. The runtime never depends on the component library. Details in docs/architecture.md.
All seven are on npm: cli · core · components · validator · studio · mcp · skills
pnpm install
pnpm check # typecheck, build, test, validate
pnpm test:browser # Playwright smoke over the real StudioCONTRIBUTING.md has the workflow. ROADMAP.md covers what is deliberately not built yet.
Functional Source License 1.1 with an MIT future grant.
Use it, modify it, and redistribute it freely, including inside a company. The one thing it does not permit is shipping a competing commercial product or service built on OpenPresent, because an enterprise edition is planned. Each release converts to the MIT License two years after it is published.