Devlog 3

hey guys. Third devlog. Devlog two shipped fifty-two templates and an art director,and the html pages finally looked somewhat decent. However, they still sucked. The slides on the first iteration had almost no images, no background, nothing. It sucked until I asked it a bunch of times to revise it.

the forensics

before writing a line of new render code i unzipped both decks and diffed the xml. Agentswarm: 15 identical stat slides, 1 picture total. the reference:13 slides, 12 large images, and a real story arc - full-bleed cover,overview dashboard, content slides with big image panels and labeled morning/afternoon/evening blocks, an insider-tip callout, a section divider. the gap wasn’t the fonts; it was structure and imagery. and since our renderer preferred keyless stock chains and fell back to random picsumgarbage when they failed, “the images are buns” was literally true.i also found the deck was leaking its own internals onto the slides:template names, character counts, a signature footer. nothing says”designed by an ai who gave up” like “generated with template vogue”.

the rebuild

scripts/pptx_template_renderer.py got rewritten around one rule: atemplate is guidance, not law. it still picks a palette, typeface pairing,and hero flavor from the spec, but every layout is chosen from the actualcontent. the archetypes are the workhorses now:- full-bleed cover with scrim, eyebrow kicker, giant title, meta strip- agenda slide with real numbered sections and content-derived stat cards- feature slides: big image panel, up to three labeled blocks (the  context / the detail / the takeaway), a key-takeaway callout- timeline, comparison, quote, and gallery variants for sections that  call for them - capped so a deck never spams the same layout- section divider, sources, and a closing slideevery slide gets header chrome with a section badge and page numbers,plus speaker notes. the image pipeline now tries the ai generator firstwith per-section prompts (verified live - one image every ten seconds),then the stock chain, then a styled gradient. the red badge and randompicsum are gone.

where it stands

still deterministic, still no llm in the loop, still pyright clean. the bronze ox is gone because the pipeline finally knows the difference between a farm animal and a model name.

still ahead: teaching the website renderer to generate its own images when the cache is cold, and pushing the same director thinking down into the pdf path.

This is a one-shot result - it kind of sucks