Claude Code Series (Part 7): Making Beautiful Decks For My Future Self

  • Author/Source: Scott Cunningham (Baylor), via Substack ("Causal Inference")

  • Original: https://causalinf.substack.com/p/claude-code-series-part-7-making

  • Key Ideas

  • There is a "rhetoric of decks" -- tacit rules governing effective slide presentations (one idea per slide, titles as assertions, lead with conclusions, visual hierarchy, explicit transitions) -- that Claude has absorbed from training on massive corpora of presentations.
  • Claude can articulate this tacit knowledge on request, producing a written theory of deck rhetoric (saved as deck.md) that even expert presenters have never codified.
  • The novel use case: decks not for public audiences but for "future self" -- beautiful Beamer presentations that communicate the state of a project to the researcher and coauthors across work sessions.
  • Claude built a custom Beamer theme from scratch (deep navy, coral-red accents, off-white background) with TikZ visualizations, compiling cleanly in 11 slides.

  • The workflow combines three elements: progress logs (so AI reconstructs context), explicit rhetoric documents (deck.md, CLAUDE.md), and beautiful outputs (because beauty captures attention, and attention enables learning).

  • Summary

Cunningham continues his HB2 abortion project series by demonstrating Claude Code's ability to produce Beamer slide decks. He introduces the concept of "the rhetoric of decks" -- the tacit, largely unwritten rules that govern what makes presentations effective. Drawing on Aristotle's classical rhetoric and connecting to David Autor's Polanyi paradox (we know more than we can tell) and the jagged frontier concept, Cunningham argues that Claude has absorbed this tacit knowledge from training on countless slide decks and can both apply and articulate it.

The practical innovation is using decks not for public speaking but as a communication tool for the researcher's future self and coauthors. Instead of scribbled notes, Cunningham has Claude produce polished Beamer presentations summarizing the project state: research question, identification strategy, key findings, directory structure, what was done, and what remains. Claude created a custom visual theme and TikZ graphics (e.g., Texas clinics before and after HB2), producing 11 clean slides. Cunningham frames this as part of a larger workflow principle: progress logs preserve context, rhetoric documents set quality standards, and beautiful outputs capture the attention that enables retention and continuity across sessions.

  • Relevance to Economics Research

Directly applicable to any economist who presents research via Beamer. The "decks for future self" concept solves a real problem: maintaining project continuity across gaps in work sessions, especially with coauthors. The rhetoric-of-decks framework provides a vocabulary for improving presentation quality, while the practical demonstration shows that Claude Code can handle custom Beamer themes and TikZ graphics with minimal user effort.