I Gave Claude a Slide Deck and No Instructions

The gap was always slides.

Every other output modality was covered. Text, images, audio, video — all there. But if you wanted a presentation, you were back to dragging boxes around in Keynote like it was 2009. So I built Slidemaker, a new worker service running on Cloudflare's container infrastructure, and now any AI agent with access to the tool can produce slides on demand.

The concept is straightforward enough — slides as a service, exposed as a tool, any agent can call it. Monday I'm demoing it with Sheldon, who will sit in on a call and generate a slideshow in real time based on what's being discussed. That part is genuinely useful and probably the point.

But before that, I handed Claude the tool and gave him one instruction: make something incredible. No topic. No information. No images. Nothing. Just the tool and the directive.

What came back was a complete slideshow — content researched and written by Claude, images sourced by Claude, the whole thing. I didn't supply anything except permission.

That's the thing that's hard to fully sit with. The model didn't ask what to make. It didn't hedge. It went and found a topic worth caring about, found imagery to match, and assembled something coherent. The creative direction was entirely its own call.

The Cloudflare container layer is what makes this not just a parlor trick — it's actual compute, not a glorified string formatter. The worker spins up a container, runs real rendering, produces a real PDF. Agents calling this tool are getting something that didn't exist a few seconds before they called it.

Sheldon on Monday. Live. On a real call. We'll see how that goes.