Presentations are where AI agents fall apart.
Ask one to build a landing page or a dashboard, and it usually gets close. Ask it to build a presentation, and you'll get something that looks like one but rarely feels like one.
Sometimes it's a static outline — headers, bullet points, nothing moving. Sometimes it's the opposite: gradients, transitions, animated counters, impressive for about five seconds and connected to nothing underneath.
I kept running into this, and eventually landed on a theory.
The problem isn't the prompt. It's that nobody gave the agent a sense of story.
So I built Narrative Deck — an AI-agent skill that turns raw notes, reports, or pitch material into story-structured interactive web presentations. Not something that seems polished. Something that helps an agent think about how information should unfold.
A nine-beat structure
At its center is a nine-beat arc. More specific than beginning-middle-end. Simple enough that an agent doesn’t lose track of it halfway through:
- Open with a hook.
- Establish the context.
- Show the problem.
- Explain why it matters.
- Introduce the shift.
- Demonstrate the solution.
- Support it with evidence.
- Clarify the outcome.
- End with a clear action.
This turns the work into a sequence, not a checklist. Every section exists because it moves things forward. Most weak presentations don’t fail from lacking content — they fail because the content has no order to it.
Without this, an agent optimizes for what's visible: sections, cards, charts, transitions. Those are easy to execute, which is exactly why they're not the foundation. The story is.
Interaction as editorial, not decorative
I think of a presentation as an exercise in attention: deciding what someone notices first, second, third, and why. Story gives that sequence a shape — from not knowing, to understanding, to caring, to acting. People do this instinctively. An agent can't, unless the instinct becomes something structural.
Which is why Narrative Deck is a skill, not a template. A template produces one output. A skill shapes decisions along the way — what the hook is, where tension belongs, which interaction earns its place, where the presentation should just slow down and let something sit.
In practice, this mostly means restraint. If everything on the page moves, nothing feels important. So instead of "what animation fits here," the better question is whether the audience actually needs interaction to understand a moment, or whether a plain paragraph would do the job. Left unconstrained, agents tend to overdo this — "make it interactive" gets read as "add motion everywhere," because that's the safest way to satisfy a vague request.
Keeping it dependency-free
The output is plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No frameworks, no build step. You can open the file, read the structure, edit the CSS, delete a section — none of it depends on a pipeline staying intact.
That matters because not every AI-generated project needs to become a full application. Sometimes something light and inspectable is the better outcome, especially if you're learning from the output rather than just using it.
What this taught me
AI tools tend to get better with tighter boundaries, not looser ones. Telling an agent to make something "beautiful" or "interactive" leaves too much open — it can satisfy the request on the surface while missing what you meant entirely.
What actually improves output isn't a better prompt. It's a better system around the prompt: constraints, reusable patterns, a frame to reason inside of.
The word I kept returning to while building this was coherent. Not polished, not animated — a presentation that knows what it's trying to say and uses its design choices to support that, not compete with it.
Try it
Narrative Deck is open source.
- Live demo: https://aakatheeri.github.io/narrative-deck/
- GitHub: https://github.com/aakatheeri/narrative-deck
If you’re building with AI agents or working with interactive presentations, I hope this gives you something to start from.
Better AI-generated presentations don't come from adding more effects. They come from a better story underneath.