Build Slides

Build presentation slides from your deck plan. This guide walks you through building all slides at once, building a single slide for iterative refinement, rebuilding after plan changes, and viewing the results.

Prerequisites

Before building slides, make sure you have:

A Pitch Smith workspace scaffolded in your project (run /pitchsmith if you have not set one up yet -- see Quickstart)
A deck plan created via /pitchsmith:plan-deck that describes the slides you want to build
Claude Code running in your project directory

Build All Slides

Build every unbuilt slide in your deck plan in a single batch. Use this when you are ready to generate the entire presentation at once.

Open a Claude Code session in your project directory.
Run the build-all command:
```
/pitchsmith:build-all
```
Pitch Smith reads your deck plan, finds all slides with a "pending" status, and builds them in order. You will see progress updates as each slide is generated:
```
Building slide 3 of 10... (1/8)
```
When the batch completes, Pitch Smith displays a summary showing how many slides were built and whether any failed.

Verify: All slides built successfully

Check your deck's slides directory:

ls output/<your-deck-slug>/slides/

Expected: HTML files for each slide in your plan (for example, slide-1.html, slide-2.html, slide-3.html, and so on). Each file should be larger than 1 KB.

You can also check the plan to confirm all slides are marked as "built":

cat output/<your-deck-slug>/plan.yaml

Expected: Each slide entry shows status: built (or status: failed if a slide encountered an error).

What if some slides fail?

The build-all command continues past failures -- if one slide encounters an error, the rest of the batch still builds. Failed slides are reported in the summary. You can retry them individually with /pitchsmith:build-one (see below).

Build a Single Slide

Build one slide at a time. Use this when you want to iterate on a specific slide, retry a failed slide, or build slides incrementally.

Open a Claude Code session in your project directory.
Run the build-one command:
```
/pitchsmith:build-one
```
Pitch Smith finds the next unbuilt slide in your plan (the first slide with a "pending" status) and generates it.
After the build completes, Pitch Smith reports which slide was built and how many remain.

Verify: Single slide built

Check your deck's slides directory for the new file:

ls output/<your-deck-slug>/slides/

Expected: A new HTML file for the slide that was just built (for example, slide-1.html). The file size should be larger than 1 KB.

When to use build-one vs. build-all

Use /pitchsmith:build-all when you want to generate your entire deck in one go -- ideal for first builds or when you have finalized your plan.
Use /pitchsmith:build-one when you want to review each slide individually before building the next, or when retrying a specific slide that failed during a batch build.

Rebuild After Plan Changes

When you modify your deck plan (for example, updating a slide's title, key points, or template assignment), you can rebuild the affected slides to pick up the changes.

Edit your plan file or re-run /pitchsmith:plan-deck to update the plan content.
To rebuild a specific slide, change its status back to "pending" in plan.yaml, then run:
```
/pitchsmith:build-one
```
Pitch Smith finds the slide with "pending" status and rebuilds it using the updated plan content.
To rebuild all pending slides at once:
```
/pitchsmith:build-all
```
This picks up any slides whose status has been set back to "pending" and regenerates them.

Verify: Rebuilt slide reflects plan changes

Open the rebuilt slide in your browser or the Slide Viewer. Confirm that the updated content (new title, revised key points, different template layout) appears in the generated HTML.

If the slide still shows old content, verify that:

The plan file was saved after your edits
The slide's status was set back to "pending" before rebuilding

How rebuilding works

Pitch Smith uses your plan file as the source of truth. Each slide in the plan has a status field. When you run a build command, only slides with status: pending are generated. Already-built slides are skipped. To force a rebuild, set the slide's status back to "pending" in the plan file, and the next build command will regenerate it with the latest plan content.

View Your Slides

After building, view your slides in the Pitch Smith Slide Viewer or directly in a browser.

Using the Slide Viewer (VS Code Extension)

If you have the Pitch Smith VS Code extension installed, the Slide Viewer opens automatically after a build completes. If it does not open automatically, or you want to open it manually:

Open VS Code in your project directory.
Open the Command Palette (Cmd+Shift+P on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows/Linux).
Run Pitch Smith: Open Slide Viewer.
Select your deck to browse all built slides with navigation controls, thumbnail sidebar, and presentation mode.

Opening in a Browser

You can also open any slide HTML file directly:

open output/<your-deck-slug>/slides/slide-1.html

On Linux, use xdg-open instead of open. On Windows, use start.

Refreshing the Viewer

If you have built new slides or edited existing ones and the viewer does not show the latest content, refresh the manifest:

/pitchsmith:refresh

This regenerates the slide manifest so the viewer picks up newly built or modified slides.

Verify: Slides appear in the viewer

In the Slide Viewer, you should see:

Thumbnail previews for each built slide in the sidebar
The selected slide rendered at full size in the main panel
Navigation controls to step through slides
Your brand theme applied consistently across all slides

If slides are missing from the viewer, run /pitchsmith:refresh to update the manifest.

Build All Slides​

Build a Single Slide​

Rebuild After Plan Changes​

View Your Slides​

Using the Slide Viewer (VS Code Extension)​

Opening in a Browser​

Refreshing the Viewer​

See Also​