Every presentation tool I have used wants to be a design tool. Drag this box, align that shape, pick a font, fiddle with spacing. I have given hundreds of presentations over 20 years, and the pattern is always the same: 30% of my time goes to content, 70% to layout. Moving text boxes, resizing images, fighting with PowerPoint’s idea of “alignment.”
So I built Slaide.
One .slaide file - Markdown for the words, a short YAML block for the theme - renders to a web deck, a PDF and an editable .pptx from the same source. Because the source is plain text, it diffs in git, it lives in your repo, and an AI agent can write it directly without touching a GUI.
A slide looks like this:
theme:
name: volt-dark
palette: ocean
---
# Why plain text
- Version control works out of the box
- AI agents write slides as text files
- No proprietary format lock-in
- One source, three outputs
That is a complete, renderable slide. Theme block sets the look, everything after --- is content in Markdown.
Why plain text matters
Git. That is the short answer. Diff your slides. Branch for different audiences. Merge changes from a colleague. Try doing that with a .pptx file.
The longer answer is AI. Slaide has an MCP server and an Agent Skill. Point Claude at a topic and it writes a complete deck - not by driving a GUI, but by writing a text file. AI is good at text. It is terrible at dragging boxes.
And batch processing becomes trivial. Generate 50 decks from a CSV. Render them all to PDF in a CI pipeline. Automate what should be automated.
What it can do
The core - renderer, CLI, .pptx import and export, MCP server, Agent Skill - is Apache-2.0 on GitHub. Free to use, modify, embed in your own tools. The .pptx export produces real text boxes and shapes, so anyone can edit the result in PowerPoint afterward.
There is a WYSIWYG editor for people who do want to click around, available on the web and in the desktop viewer. An iOS app on the App Store with full rendering and in-app AI generation - the editor is free on iOS, only the AI features cost money.
It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and the web.
Where it falls short
An art-directed deck with hand-placed decoration does not survive intact. Custom geometry rasterises, because I cannot reproduce arbitrary vector paths from a theme definition. Hand-tuned spacing gets overridden by the layout engine.
But for conference talks, internal updates, pitch decks, lecture slides - the 90% of presentations where the content matters more than the kerning - it works. Write the content, pick a theme, export.
If you are curious, getslaide.com has the web editor. The CLI and MCP server are on GitHub. Give it a go and tell me what you think. Genuinely curious.