Devlog 2

hey guys.

second devlog. the first was about keeping the pipeline alive underpressure; this one is about making it actually good. the goal was to stop thecreator from reaching for the same handful of preset looks, and to make theresearcher think before it searches. along the way a few hundred errors inthe problems panel just magically fricking appeared and took me way too long to fricking solve.

A bunch of new clean templates

The previous set of templates that the creator agent was given were complete dodo, like worse than the gta 6 leaks by cyberpunk and thick of it. the old template system was a few hardcoded themes and a color swap. Now, there are fifty-two distinct templates across eight categories - editorial, corporate, tech, creative, minimal, data,storytelling, luxury.

Each one is a complete design dna, not a recolored clone: its own palette, typography pairing, grid, signature element(oversized type, noise grain, gradient orbs, marble texture…), and section composition rules. both the html and pptx renderers consume the same specs,so a website and its matching deck look like siblings.

New agent - art director

Templates alone just give you more wallpaper, so the creator got an art director (agents/art_director.py). it maps the task and industry to a visual direction - palette mood, typography voice, imagery style, layout personality - across ten moods from editorial to brutalist to nightlife. a coffee shop brief lands on faded-sun vintage with grainy texture; a saas pitch gets cool slate and a bento grid. no llm, always available, and its direction folds into template selection so outputs stop looking like one fixed style.

Added visuals to the slides (still need a lot of work)

the pptx renderer’s primary path is now the spec-driven template renderer:one dominant focal point per slide - image plus caption, stat, quote,timeline, or comparison - short visible text, and human speaker notes onevery slide. something visual every slide, balanced against the words.

quality passes before anything renders

markdown now runs through deterministic passes in agents/creator_quality.pybefore the creator touches it. humanize_text scrubs the telltale ai-isms(moreover, leverage, delve, seamless…) so the voice reads human.narrative_arc_md makes sure sources land at the end instead of opening thepiece. annotate_visual_hints finds sections that would render as unbrokenprose and injects a takeaway bullet from the section’s own first goodsentence. and the new quality_gate self-reports coverage issues onproduced outputs.

the researcher plans and verifies now

research used to be: search, scrape, write whatever came back. nowagents/research_plan.py turns the task plus the planner handoff into subtopics, key questions, and evidence targets that anchor every search round - targeted instead of spray-and-pray, with deterministic fallbacks so fast mode still works with zero llm calls. and agents/evidence.py extracts atomic claims from scraped sources, then verifies them across sources:corroborated, contradicted, or unsupported. the synthesis prompt now refuses to present a number as fact unless the evidence view backs it, and the researcher wires its handoff text back into the prompts it actually sends -which was fetch-and-forget before.

This is a slideshow it made after a lot of tweaking (like 20+ prompts); I want it to be able to do such a thing in 1 prompt so still a lot of work to be done.