Slides as a compromise

Cast bar: the editor, alone. The nine are greyed: they have not arrived yet.

The old way

Words on this page: an agent, here, is an AI that works in a loop: it reads, decides, acts with tools, and checks the result. The player is the part of the talk's site that let me press play on stage.

Narrator. For years my slides were a compromise. I had an idea to get across, and the slides could not move, so I spent the talk explaining what they could not show: this goes from here to there, this grows, this breaks. I talked over my own pictures.

Narrator. On 1 November, three days after the talk, I recorded a voice note about it, and this is how it came out, unedited: "I had to speak a lot because in a way I had to provide the animation that was missing. I didn't know if I wanted to say, look, here, these things moves from A to B, you know, I kind of had to explain that A to B move". That is the problem in one sentence. The idea was a movement. The slide was a still. I was the bit in between.

Narrator. The note went on, and I will give you more of it, because it is the problem in my own words before it is the book's:

"what was very powerful with this presentation is I had a lot of moments where I didn't have to do that. I just pressed play. And I basically was able to just use the animation on the screen to provide that visual explanation. And I had the ability to do multiple rounds of fine-tuning, where I would go, okay, so this animation does this, but we're missing this message, or we're missing this punchline, or that core idea is not fully well represented."

Narrator. Two things in that, and the rest of this part is about both. Pressing play, instead of explaining. And rounds of fine-tuning: this does this, but the message is missing, again.

Narrator. It sounds small. It is not. Every minute I spend narrating an arrow is a minute the room is listening to me describe a picture instead of thinking about the idea. And the harder the idea, the more of it lives in the movement: how something spreads, where it stops, what changes when you add more of it. Those were exactly the ideas I wanted to get across.

Figure: "A slide versus a loop" (left half): a speaker beside a still slide with an arrow from A to B, three speech bubbles explaining the arrow.

Pressing play

Narrator. On 29 October I gave a talk where I mostly did not have to do that. When a thing had to move, I pressed play and it moved.

Figure: the player as I saw it on stage: the slide large, a countdown against my time, the step controls, and my notes behind a key press (index/talk-site/shots/talk__player.jpg).

Narrator. Here is one moment, from the recording. It is an animation the team called the building. In it, ordinary users walk through and stop; agents keep going until they find what should not be there. I did not explain the movement. I let it run, and talked about what it meant:

"This is a really cool animation of what happens. Normal users come in and do things: they go where they're supposed to go. Every now and then one finds the gold that isn't supposed to be there, but they also tend to stop. ... Agents come with far more volume. They also change, going from users to agents, and they eventually find the gold. That's the big difference: the agent doesn't stop."

Narrator. The picture did the explaining, and I said what it meant. That is what I had wanted from slides for years.

Narrator. And a second, later in the talk. Not an animation this time: a page I had used for real, the one where I reviewed each agent's policy before it could work. I put it on the screen and talked over it only to say what it was:

"What you see now is what I did when I was onboarding my team, the team that built this slide deck. This one, for example, is for ruv.sgit, the agent that builds animations. It has a policy. I now use QR codes to communicate: the agent asks for what it wants, and I have to approve it, change it or question it, and in the end I give that to the agent as its mandate."

Narrator. The page did the explaining there too. The room saw a real policy page, not my description of one.

Figure: the policy review page as it was on the screen: one agent's policy, item by item, with a verdict beside each (index/talk-site/shots/studio-ports__abp-review.jpg). One line on the page says I had agreed all ten policies by 17:40; the files say eight of ten by the end of the day.

Band: My own words, from the transcript of the talk at 58:53 on the recording's clock (added after the day).

Narrator. And here is the part I like most. That animation was not finished in the morning and left alone. I changed it at 18:26, about half an hour before the talk was due to start. I could do that because the thing that made it was still running, and still listening.

The talk ran for about 87 minutes, to a room in London. Its transcript was added to the record after the day.

Band: The quoted passage is my own, from the transcript of the talk at 15:50 on the recording's clock (added after the day). The change at 18:26 rests on motion's wake record and its commit at 18:29.

Narrator. And a third, about twenty minutes into the talk. A picture I would have struggled to explain with a still, because what matters in it is where things move to:

"So, as you would expect, here's a Wardley map. If this is the first time you've seen one: Wardley maps are the best thing I have learned in the last decade. This is absolutely how I think. It gives me peace, it allows me to strategise, and it's probably the best systems thinking I have come across. Simon Wardley released everything under Creative Commons, and there's a good community. Fundamentally, you map the system, this needs this, which needs this, and then you map evolution: usually genesis, custom built, product and commodity."

Narrator. You will see this kind of map again in part 2, drawn for the factory itself.

Band: My own words, from the transcript of the talk at 19:27 on the recording's clock (added after the day).

What I would have had to say instead

Narrator. Take the building. Here is what the slide would have been, and what I would have had to say over it.

Figure: the building as a still slide: a box of rooms, a few dots inside, an arrow, and a label saying "agents". The still I would have shown.

Narrator. And over that still, something like this: these dots are ordinary users; they wander in and do what they are supposed to; now and then one finds something it should not, and it stops; now imagine far more of them, and imagine they never stop. Four sentences of narration, for one picture, and the room would still be imagining the movement instead of seeing it.

Figure: the same idea as three frames of the animation: users wandering and stopping; agents arriving in numbers; the agents not stopping. From ruv-sgit's and motion's work for the talk.

Band: The frames rest on the building as the talk used it; the narration beside the still is ours.

Do this now

Think of one idea you have had to explain over a still picture. Write down, in one line, the movement you were describing. That line is what your first animation, or your first agent, is for.

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Where this came from

My voice note of 1 November 2026, quoted as given. The talk as given, from its transcript, added to the record after the day. The researcher's register for the building and the policy page, and the talk's length and place. The storyteller's outline for this chapter. This chapter grows from the 70-page edition's chapter 1, its first two sections kept as written.