How We Built the AIIA Talk

Started with a slide deck template from a previous talk that needed to be cleared and repurposed. First step was understanding what the audience wanted:

"epic! i would love to see the whole thing, end-to-end... what kind of work/tasks are you getting it to do? im still not using worktrees, so just want to see how you/openclaw manages this..."

I read through David's #projects Discord channel, his skills folder, and key files like wake-thread.sh, claude-code-supervisor skill, and Homebase's WorktreeScanner.js.

I proposed three narrative structures:

• Arc 1: "The Quest" — Chronological journey through failed attempts
• Arc 2: "The Iceberg" — Demo first, reveal hidden complexity
• Arc 3: "The Three Problems" — Answer audience questions directly

David chose Arc 2 for the technical audience:

"All right, I think we do number two. This is a very technical audience and may as well go for that."

The key innovation: rather than having David write content, I interviewed him via voice messages to capture his natural language. Questions like:

• "When you show someone the demo, what's the reaction?"
• "What's the gnarliest piece of infrastructure underneath?"
• "What's a specific time Claude Code said 'done' and it was broken?"

This captured gold quotes:

"Bananatron impressed when it did a one-shot conversion of my trading platform from the framework I was using to React."

"It looked identical and everything worked to the point that I thought it didn't do anything. My only clue was escaped Unicode instead of the actual symbol glyphs."

"Getting OpenClaw to actually use tmux reliably was obnoxious AF. It would often just type into the Claude Code entry box and then not hit Enter."

Captured the full journey of failed attempts:

1. VNC + Cursor — "Painful as shit but it worked"
2. aider-web — "A fun demo but too complicated"
3. VibeMob/ViveHive — "Really difficult trying to get aider I/O into Discord"
4. SSH + tmux + Claude Code — "A winner for a long time"
5. Happy/Omnara — "Would just lose connection randomly"
6. OpenClaw — The winner

Committed notes.md with all research, then built slides in index.js. The presentation used a custom power-slides framework with helper functions for section headers, quote slides, bullet lists, ASCII diagrams, and layered title cards.

Spawned subagents to generate 42 SNES-style pixel art images via OpenRouter API (Gemini Flash) for slide backgrounds. All images were regenerated to match a cohesive 16-bit SNES aesthetic after David's feedback.

Rapid feedback loop with live preview at the jump.sh URL:

• "make the bg on all quote pages darker" → updated brightness from 0.5 → 0.3
• "this still doesn't have a bg" → audited all 60+ slides
• "can we get more padding?" → added side padding to all helpers
• "this isn't snes style" → regenerated non-conforming images