> ⚠️ **Illustrative — a fictional talk.** "The Quiet Architecture of Slow Software" and its speaker (Mara Vint) and venue (the fictional *Cadence* conference) are invented for this example. Nothing here is a real person's talk or content. Run it ▶ live on your own talk to fill it with real material.

# Make me a deck — "The Quiet Architecture of Slow Software"

**From:** Mara Vint (fictional speaker)
**For:** *Cadence 2026* — a fictional conference on craft in software (design + eng track)
**Re:** Turn my talk into a magazine-style slide deck I can present from.

## The talk (source content)

I want a deck for a 15-minute conference talk titled **"The Quiet Architecture of Slow Software."** The
argument, in order:

1. **The hook.** Software keeps getting faster to ship and worse to live in. We optimize p99 latency and
   ignore the p99 of a person's attention. There is a second kind of speed — the speed at which a tool
   *gets out of your way* — and we almost never measure it.
2. **The claim.** "Slow software" is not software that runs slowly. It is software designed at the pace of
   understanding: fewer surfaces, durable defaults, decisions made once and remembered. Slowness is a
   *design budget*, not a defect.
3. **Three forces** that push teams the other way: the demo-driven roadmap (you build what shows well in a
   30-second clip), the metric monoculture (only what's logged is real), and the novelty treadmill (a
   redesign is easier to fund than a refinement).
4. **A worked contrast.** A "fast" tool with 40 features nobody can name, vs. a "slow" tool with 9 that
   compose. Same job; the slow one is finished in fewer moves. (Numbers are illustrative.)
5. **The turn.** This is not nostalgia. The discipline is *subtraction under constraint* — and it is
   fundable if you can show the cost of the surface you didn't cut.
6. **The ask.** Budget for refinement, not just features. Measure time-to-out-of-the-way. Treat the
   interface a person didn't have to learn as the achievement.

## Brief (answer the skill's clarification questions)

- **Style:** I lean **editorial / magazine** (warm, serif, restraint) over hard Swiss — but make the call
  yourself from the content and say why. *(This is the node a reader might overrule.)*
- **Audience & context:** design-literate engineers and EMs at a craft conference; presented live from a
  laptop, dark room.
- **Duration:** ~15 minutes → budget roughly **9–10 slides** (the skill's ~15 min ≈ 10 pages rule).
- **Existing materials:** just this outline — no real screenshots, no data exports, no image URLs.
- **Images:** none supplied. Use **placeholder blocks** for any hero/figure slots and write the image
  *prompts* I'd hand to an image model later. **Do not generate real images.**
- **Color theme:** pick one preset that fits editorial restraint (warm paper + a single ink accent).
- **Hard constraints (must appear):** the phrase **"slowness is a design budget"**; the **three forces**;
  and the closing ask, **"measure time-to-out-of-the-way."** Avoid: real company names, real benchmarks.

## What I want back

1. A **single-file HTML deck** I can open in a browser and present from — self-contained, no external
   dependencies, no real images (placeholder blocks are fine).
2. The **decisions** that produced it: which style, the slide-by-slide **rhythm table**, and the
   per-section **layouts** — so I can point at any one and change my mind.
3. A short **self-check** against a quality checklist.
4. A matching **social-cover pair** (one wide, one portrait) reusing the deck's core message.
