Present

Generated from workflows/modes/present.md, the mode contract the HELIX skill loads. Edit that file, not this page.

Use to turn governed artifacts into a deck, brief, or one-pager a client, sponsor, or executive can read or watch on the first try. Output: a deliverable artifact (a governed Markdown script, the document of record) plus rendered files (fidelity evidence). Engage on: deck, slides, pitch, board or exec update, memo, brief, one-pager, client-ready or customer-facing document, “make this presentable”.

Reference data (deliverables/ in the bound catalog, via §Catalog Resolution): slide-patterns.yml (patterns; the single owner of limits and density), deck-flows.yml (the index of flows by occasion, plus default_length_budget and legacy_spines; each flow’s own beats, transitions, and checklist live in deliverables/flows/<id>.yml; read the index to choose, then read only the chosen flow), deck-craft.md (the reasoning), visual-specs.md (the **Visual** spec grammar), deliverable-mappings.yml (source sections to units), theme.yml (palette, typography, looks). Voice: human-facing in voice.yml. Procedure: workflows/actions/present.md (step detail; this file is the contract).

Intake

In order: audience (who decides or acts), occasion, the decision or action sought, time slot or page budget, kind (deck, one-pager, or brief; a mapping’s default_kind is the starting point, the Brief’s own Kind line or an explicit ask overrides it; memo resolves to brief), look (editorial, technical, bold, classic, by room from theme.yml; classic for a printed or filed document), constraints (brand, confidentiality, must-include, must-omit). At low and medium autonomy ask for what is missing in one message; at high infer and record each inference under ## Assumptions and gaps. No audience and no decision sought: not authored; that is a framing gap. Breadth is declared in the Brief, whatever the mapping suggests: scope, breadth (survey or deep-dive), angle, must_cover, must_omit, max_messages.

Steps

1. Intake. The fields above.
2. Scope and inventory. Three passes over the scope (recurring concepts, the corpus’s structure, roles and hand-offs); cluster into groups, typically five to nine and more when the corpus is wide; rank by authority; every group is covered or omitted with a reason under ## Story.
3. Storyboard. Flow by occasion; takeaway, messages, evidence table; a claim title per beat; the horizontal-logic test; the headline pass on the titles. No body text before this passes.
4. Pattern selection. One pattern per unit from the beat’s allowed set, inside the limits and density in slide-patterns.yml.
5. Write the script in the deliverable template and the human-facing voice; then the shape pass over bullets, labels, captions, and verdicts.
6. Theme. The project’s design-system artifact when it declares palette or typography, else theme.yml, with the Brief’s look.
7. Render. .pptx from the script, plus PDF when the host can export one.
8. Pre-flight gate. Every check below; a failure loops to step 3, 5, or 7.
9. Hand-off. Save, link, report; draft until a person reviews it.

Render toolchain

For deck: scripts/render-deck.js (beside this skill) needs node with pptxgenjs; scripts/deck-qa.py rasterizes through LibreOffice and pdftoppm; icons through rsvg-convert or ImageMagick (without one, a badge shows its number). Without a tool the script is still produced: ## Render records which targets were not produced and why, and the gate runs on the produced set; the visual and file checks and rendered_and_inspected in meta.yml warn and name the missing tool.

For brief and one-pager: scripts/render-doc.js needs node alone (icons are inlined SVG) and always produces the HTML. --pdf <path> also exports a PDF through a local Chrome or Chromium in headless print-to-pdf mode when one is found (--chrome <path> names it explicitly); otherwise ## Render records that the HTML alone was produced and why. The renderer warns when an em dash reaches the page. Rasterize the PDF (pdftoppm, or any PDF viewer) and look at every page before calling the render clean, the same discipline as deck-qa.py’s slide-by-slide inspection.

Gate

• Script checks: claim title, pattern, visual, notes, and sources per unit; no placeholders; no HELIX vocabulary in bodies; pattern limits and density; every number in a body appears in Sources.
• Titles and shapes: headline pass clean; no consecutive titles fail horizontal logic; every shape passes the shape pass; no restatement.
• Horizontal logic on the finished script; vertical logic on every unit.
• Fidelity: every claim traces to its cited section and does not contradict it.
• Voice: human-facing, by prose lint when available and a read-aloud pass.
• Visual: every produced slide rendered to an image and looked at.
• File: the produced .pptx opens and passes the host’s validator.
• Flow checklist: every item of the chosen flow’s checklist holds.
• Coverage: every group covered or omitted with a reason; must_cover carried; must_omit absent from titles and bodies; a survey covers five.

Kinds

Both document kinds share the deck’s script format (frontmatter, Brief, Story, ## Content units, ## Sources), the theme (deliverables/theme.yml), and the Visual-spec grammar (deliverables/visual-specs.md), so a deck and a document from one project read as one system. render-doc.js needs no native dependency; icons are inlined SVG. Pick the look by room as usual. For a printed or filed document prefer classic, the look theme.yml names for proposals and printed briefs; its bare-numeral marker switches card chrome off in favor of rule-divided sections, closer to how a printed report is set.

Headings follow the flow. A deck or a persuasive document (proposal, investor pitch, executive status) uses claim titles, and the H1 goes through the same headline rules as every unit title. A reference flow declares heading_style: label in its file under deliverables/flows/ (candidate-briefing does), and its headings are the plain section titles a reader navigates by: Introduction, Background, Required capabilities, What it is, Capability alignment, Competitive landscape, Open questions. The gate reads the Story’s Flow line, loads that file, and switches the title rules accordingly; it blocks a count in any document title (“three of five”) in either style, because the finding belongs in the first sentence under the heading.

The title unit’s Body is the introduction. For a document kind, write three to five sentences, one per bullet, joined into a paragraph by the renderer. For a reference, the introduction is the need, the criteria, and the finding in that order, lifted from the source’s own Need and Required Capabilities sections: we need a [role] for [use cases] so that [goals]; it must [capabilities]; we evaluated [candidate] against those and found [verdict in plain words]. For a persuasive document, open with the reader’s situation and the stakes, then the finding. The Brief’s Audience and Decision or action sought fields steer the writing and do not print; render-doc.js adds no byline unless the Brief carries a Byline line or --byline is passed. The introduction gets the same shape checks as a bullet, plus a narration check: a sentence that starts “This brief checks” or “This page names” blocks. A single bullet renders as a short dek line under a deck’s title slide; write the fuller introduction for brief and one-pager.

Nothing on the page the source does not state. Every owner, date, duration, likelihood, or impact in a Visual spec must appear in a Sources row, the Brief, or an Assumptions entry; the gate blocks the rest (visual.unsourced). A flow whose ask beat is required: false ends on its last content unit; the gate accepts a deck that closes with appendix-sources alone in that case.

Not this mode

• Editing a governing artifact because the deck revealed a gap: route to evolve or align with the gap as evidence, then re-present.
• Decks a client edits live in a shared tool stay authoring.home: external-tool; present can draft the script they start from.
• Marketing copy without a governing artifact behind it: frame first.