Decks and Briefs from Governed Documents

HELIX documents serve the people and agents doing the work. The present mode of the HELIX skill turns them into something a person outside the project reads or watches: a deck, a one-pager, or a brief, with every figure traced to the document section it came from. This page assumes you have a governed set of project documents (a vision, requirements, designs) and an agent that runs the HELIX skill. After reading it you can ask that agent for a deck and judge the one it hands back.

Who it is for

Teams whose sponsors, clients, and executives do not read PRDs. The deck says what the documents say, in the audience’s words, and nothing the documents do not say. The Markdown script is the document of record, a deliverable artifact; the rendered files are fidelity evidence, proof that the script renders as written. A person reviews the script like any other artifact before it goes out.

The pipeline

1. Brief. Name the audience, the occasion, the decision you want from the room, the time slot, and the kind: deck, one-pager, or brief. Without an audience and a decision, nothing gets written.
2. Inventory and scope. The skill reads every document in scope, counts the concepts that recur, reads the structure and roles the documents encode, and clusters them into five to nine groups. You choose the breadth: a survey covers the whole scope; a deep-dive names what it leaves out. Each group gets marked covered or omitted, with a reason.
3. Storyboard. One takeaway sentence, three to five messages each with a source section, then one claim title per beat, before any body text. The titles-only test: read the titles in order; they must state the argument and end in the ask. When they fail, the titles change, not the bodies.
4. Headline and shape passes. Each title is one sentence with a subject, a verb, and one concrete noun, ten words or fewer. Each bullet, label, and caption has to say something the visual does not.
5. Patterns and figures. Each slide gets one pattern (claim with evidence, comparison, diagram, statement, ask) and one visual: a chart with named series, a layer stack, a cycle, an icon list. A relationship is a diagram, not a bullet list.
6. Look. One of the four looks below.
7. Render. The script renders to a slide file and, where the host can export one, a PDF.
8. Gate. Script checks first, then a screenshot pass: every slide renders to an image and someone looks at each for overflow, collisions, and missing visuals. A deck nobody looked at does not pass.

What the gate refuses

• A number in a body that no source section holds.
• HELIX vocabulary in bodies: artifact IDs, activity names, and work-item terms live in the Sources appendix, not on a slide.
• Label titles (“Results”, “Approach”) and titles that fail the titles-only read.
• Bullets that restate the visual or each other.

The anti-slop rules lists every rule with examples and says where each one runs.

The four looks

• editorial: serif display type, dark opening and closing slides, light content; for evaluation calls and board packs.
• technical: one sans-serif family, light throughout, square markers; for engineering audiences.
• bold: dark throughout, with the secondary hue leading; for pitches and keynotes.
• classic: serif display type and no marker shape; for proposals and printed briefs.

Palette and type come from your project’s design-system artifact when it declares them, otherwise from the HELIX default theme.

What a host needs to render

Rendering is optional. To produce the files, the host needs Node with pptxgenjs for the slide file, LibreOffice for the PDF export, pdftoppm for the screenshot pass, and rsvg-convert or ImageMagick for the icons. Without them, the skill still writes and checks the script, and says which host can render it.

The worked example

HELIX’s own evaluation deck, One discipline governs agent work from intent to release, came out of the product vision, requirements, and workflow documents this way. Its page carries the script, the sources, the gate record, and the rendered PDF. The full mode contract is on the present reference page.