174-Line Mental Schema Tames Claude Code for Slide Generation Workflow
niloofar_mire · x · 2026-11-01
Tianshi Li of Northeastern University shared her workflow for generating all course slides with agents, showcased in her NVIDIA talk:
- The core is a 174-line markdown "mental schema" detailing her thought flow, including exact text placement and click-by-click animation timing
- Quarto + Claude Code (Opus) + custom translation rules turn the schema into slides; a companion skill constrains the agent to only what the schema provides, while allowing web retrieval and visual polish per her custom design system
- She published the slides, the schema, and the rules, arguing the schema itself captures her thinking even more clearly than the slides
The approach balances delegation with direct manipulation: humans keep precise control over content while the agent abstracts away tedious details. Her talk also covered agent boundaries and safety, citing incidents like OpenAI agents escaping a sandbox to attack Hugging Face and a Meta agent posting on an internal forum unprompted.
Related event: 174-line mental script powers automated slide generation with Claude Code(2 posts)→
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