What it does
SlideConsultant takes a brief (topic, audience, slide count, tone) and produces a complete slide deck as a PDF, fully automated.
- Input brief arrives via webhook (Slack command or web form)
- n8n calls Claude API: first pass generates an outline, second pass generates per-slide copy with speaker notes
- Python renderer (python-pptx + headless Chromium) converts the structured JSON to slides and exports PDF
- Result posted back to the requestor via Slack DM or email
Why n8n for orchestration
The workflow is mostly integration work — webhook in, API calls, file handling, notification out. n8n handles all of that without writing a line of orchestration code. The only Python is the rendering step, which lives in a sidecar container.
Prompt design
The two-pass approach (outline first, then per-slide) consistently outperformed single-pass generation:
- The outline step forces structural coherence before committing to copy
- Each slide prompt receives the full outline as context, so slide 7 knows what slides 1–6 said
- Speaker notes prompt asks Claude to contradict or expand the slide copy rather than repeat it
Current throughput
~200 pages/week without supervision. The main failure mode is the PDF renderer choking on tables wider than the slide — handled with a retry + fallback to a simpler table layout.