deck-design

name

deck-design

description

Design first-principles, Socratic, Feynman-style lecture decks and delivery scripts. Use when the user wants to build or restructure a teaching deck, talk, workshop, or lecture script, sequence an explanation from intuition to formalism, write a cold open or a "first question" hook, add takeaways and verified citations, or turn a technical topic into a narrative that derives before it names. Pairs with the bundled diagram-from-concept skill (for visuals) and, if installed, an external slide-rendering skill such as ai-concept-slides (for rendered slides).

Deck Design (First-Principles Lecture Studio)

Build lectures that make the audience derive the idea before you hand them the word for it. The deck is a script with stage directions, not a wall of bullets.

Read this first

Load deck-conventions.md (in this skill folder) before writing anything. It is the accumulated house style and it grows every time the user corrects a deck. The standing rule that never drifts: no em dashes anywhere; use colons, commas, semicolons, or parentheses.

The teaching spine (apply in order)

1. Why before what. Open on a problem the audience already feels, not a definition.
2. Derive before name. Let them guess, get it wrong, then reveal the mechanism. Name the concept only after they can see why it must be true.
3. Mechanism, not vibe. Every claim resolves to something the audience can point at. "A mechanism. You will be able to point at it."
4. One idea per beat. A beat is a single move: a question, a reveal, a demo, a takeaway. Never stack two.
5. Earn each principle with a question. Precede a principle with a question whose obvious answer is wrong.

Script structure that works

• Cold open: a 30-second current hook, one laugh, then a hard pivot to the thesis.
• The promise: ask the audience to write down the concrete failure they will learn to diagnose. Promise a mechanism, not a vibe.
• The first question: pose the question whose common answer is the misconception the lecture corrects.
• Principles: 3 is the ceiling. Each = question, reveal, demo, takeaway, transition.
• The close: walk back through the principles against the failure they wrote down. End on one action to run tonight.

Every principle ends the same way

Close each principle with this fixed shape so the audience can feel the rhythm:

1. Run this tonight: one concrete action, phrased as a command.
2. Takeaway (boxed): the single sentence they keep.
3. Source (boxed): the verified citation. Title, author or org, date, URL. Verify recent sources by web search before presenting; never cite from memory.
4. Bridge: one short paragraph that turns the resolved principle into the question the next principle answers.

Citations

• Verify every source against the live web before the talk. Recent posts move; confirm exact title, author, and date.
• Quote sparingly and under 15 words. Prefer paraphrase. One quote per source maximum.
• Prefer primary sources (the vendor's own blog, the docs, the paper) over aggregators.

Producing the artifact

• For visuals (pipeline, comparison, layered stack, zoom), invoke the bundled diagram-from-concept skill. Use a diagram wherever the script has a bracketed visual cue.
• For rendered slides, invoke an external slide-rendering skill (for example ai-concept-slides) if one is installed. It is not bundled with this plugin; if it is unavailable, deliver the script as the artifact.
• Keep the script and the slides in sync: the script is the source of truth, slides follow it.

Self-check before finishing

• No em dashes anywhere.
• Each principle was earned by a question with a wrong obvious answer.
• Every principle has Run-tonight, Takeaway, Source, Bridge.
• Every source verified against the live web today.
• Every bracketed visual cue has a plan or a built diagram.
• The close maps each principle back to the audience's written-down failure.