Slides as a compromise

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

The old way

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

Clock: Hour nineteen.

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.

The loop

Clock: Hours fourteen to nineteen.

Narrator. That last change is the real story. Not the animation: the loop.

Narrator. In the afternoon of the 29th I came back to the team and started asking for things. The player, the piece that let me press play on stage, was my first priority; I said so at about ten to two. By seven minutes past three a first version was in. From then until the last hour I kept asking, and each time it came back changed, and I looked again. My last ask for the player has my own time on it, 18:25: two back steps in a row while playing went wrong, and the first slide should open already built. It landed at 18:37.

Narrator. That is a feedback loop. See it, ask for it differently, see it again. With slides, the loop ran through me alone. Here it ran through a team, and it ran as fast as I could look.

Figure: "A slide versus a loop" (right half): the same idea as a circle of three arrows, see, ask, see again, with a small factory inside the circle doing the work.

Band: Rests on the player named his main priority (about 13:50), its port (15:07), and the last fixes made at my word, the last asked at 18:25 and landed at 18:37, inside a wake that was opened and never closed.

Inventing on principle

Narrator. When I started this book, one idea I named was not mine. It comes from a talk by Bret Victor, "Inventing on Principle", given at CUSEC in 2012. His principle, in his words:

"Creators need an immediate connection to what they create. That's my principle."

Narrator. I am not claiming the day lived up to that. A change came back within the hour, not with the next keystroke. But the direction is the same. The distance between what I meant and what the room would see got short enough that I stopped compromising and started fine-tuning, round after round.

Narrator. So what did "immediate" mean on the day? Here is the honest version, from the record, and the card below has every time. In the last stretch before the talk, every ask I made came back in minutes: the quickest inside one, the slowest in about a quarter of an hour.

Narrator. That is not Victor's keystroke. It is minutes. But it is a round trip I could make while the thing was still mine to change.

Narrator. With slides, I made that trip alone, and usually once.

Figure: one ask's round trip drawn to the clock: my ask at 18:25, the commit that answered it at 18:37, and the hold at 18:44 at the edge of the picture.

Band: My afternoon asks with my own time in their commit subjects, and when each came back, as the register holds them.

Narrator. That is what I mean by control of the medium, as I put it when I started this book: seeing the effect of a change while I could still do something about it.

Band: Bret Victor's words as published; the talk named and dated as the register holds it (CUSEC 2012).

Do this now

Write down the one idea you want somebody to understand, and what they should be able to do after. That sentence is your first brief. Working with others? Write it together, and keep one copy everyone can see.

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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 every figure and quote: the building and its change at 18:26, the talk's length, when and where it was due, the player's last fixes, my afternoon asks and when each came back, and Bret Victor's talk. ruv-sgit's drawing of the afternoon loop. The storyteller's outline for this chapter. This chapter grows from the 30-page edition's chapter 1, sections 1 to 4, kept as written.