The Story Behind Plain-Text Decks

Slaide is a slide language built for the age of AI authoring: open source under Apache-2.0, with the whole design living in one YAML theme file.

Slaide started from a simple observation: language models are great at writing presentations, and terrible at writing PowerPoint.

A .pptx file is a zip of namespaced XML - bulky, overloaded, and easy to get subtly wrong. Ask a model to produce one and it botches the markup, mangles the layout, or quietly drops content. The format fights the tool.

Slaide flips that. A deck is one plain-text .slaide file: Markdown for the words, a small YAML master for the design. It’s roughly 10 KB of text a model gets right the first time - and a human can read, review, and diff like code. From that single source, Slaide renders a navigable web deck and a high-fidelity PDF (and exports an editable .pptx when you need to hand one back).

Design lives in data

The thing that makes Slaide work for both audiences is that a “design” isn’t a pile of hand-placed slides - it’s a theme file. Fonts, colors, gradients, the grid of every layout, the header/footer chrome: all of it is named data in one YAML master. Authors reference layouts and colors by name and never hand-style a pixel. Swap the master and every slide re-skins.

That constraint is what lets one theme serve hundreds of unknown decks, and what lets an AI agent both use a theme and author a new one.

Open source

Slaide is released under Apache-2.0 - the parser, compiler, web and PDF renderers, the PowerPoint/Keynote importer, the CLI, the MCP server, and the native desktop viewer. The language, CLI, and viewer need no account, ever - clone it, build with it, and contribute back. The visual editor is free too; it just asks you to sign in on desktop and the web (the iPhone app doesn’t even need that). The only thing that costs money is the cloud AI that designs decks for you.

Slaide is part of the AIVory family of developer tools for AI-era teams.