Hi HN! Excited to share something my friend and I have been building over many weekends.

I'm a physicist turned software engineer; my buddy went from consulting to tech. We met at a college where the popular path after graduation was consulting or finance (over a decade ago) so we have a lot of friends in the space. We saw firsthand how much of a consultant/analyst's life is spent in PowerPoint: nudging boxes around, putting talking points into a visual format, “beautifying” slides…etc.

There were already AI presentation tools like Claude and Gamma, but the feedback we kept hearing was:

1. They don't handle importing and editing existing PowerPoint decks well. 2. They rely heavily on templates, so decks look repetitive or generic quickly. 3. They're great for web presentations, but less useful if your workflow ends in .pptx, because they're rarely 100% PowerPoint compatible.

Brightdeck is our attempt at an AI presentation maker/editor for people who still live in PowerPoint and need OOXML compatability. You can import a deck, ask it to add slides or make edits, and export back to PowerPoint. It also generates slides without fixed templates. Instead of picking from a few layouts, it constructs each slide directly: text boxes, shapes, images, icons, diagrams, charts etc.

Two technical challenges were much harder than expected, which is why it took us this long to launch.

The first was PowerPoint compatibility, which means digging deep into OOXML. Claude was quite helpful for parts of the spec, though it gets things wrong A LOT and needs verification, so we ended up printing out and reading the ISO manuals. Some parts aren't fully implemented yet: SmartArt in OOXML has near-infinite styling variations that are poorly defined (e.g., a flowchart can have children but the spec doesn’t define how those children are spaced, so you have to reverse engineer it), and right now we convert charts to images when rendering in PowerPoint. This is not ideal, but it preserves fidelity until we add full spec support.

The second was the canvas and multiplayer editing. We wanted realtime collaboration from day one because retrofitting it later is painful. We use a simplified CRDT-like approach for slide state and syncing. It works well for most object-level edits, but realtime text-box editing isn't fully reliable yet when multiple people edit the same text at the same time. In practice people rarely edit the same text box at the same moment, so we accepted that tradeoff.

We debated building a PowerPoint plugin instead of a web app, but ultimately decided against that because we want to have full control over the UI. It also makes it easier to build an MCP server on top, so users can generate decks in ChatGPT and Claude directly.

For the agentic architecture we picked LangGraph — the modularity makes components easier to test. We used Gemini and Qwen for generation.

For this launch, I used Brightdeck to summarize HN sentiment on a top post this week (Fable 5 release): https://app.brightdeck.ai/presentations/019eae69-bbff-739f-a.... I found the deck version quite entertaining. More examples (all one-shot, warts and all so you can see unfiltered what the product can do): https://brightdeck.ai/showcase/.

The results aren't perfect. Some images are less relevant than they should be. But we think the direction is promising, especially for workflows that need an actual .pptx at the end.

You can try it here: https://brightdeck.ai/. There is a generous free tier and no credit card is required. Mobile is supported but editing on mobile is quite limited at this time, so I would suggest using it on a computer.

My friend and I are longtime HN lurkers and have always wanted to do a Show HN together, so this launch is a special one for us. We'd love feedback, especially from people who've made a lot of decks, or worked with OOXML, collaborative canvases, or AI document generation.