Codex Slides: open-source AI studio turns prompts into decks in 4–5 minutes

Codex Slides is an open-source slide studio purpose-built for coding agents and local workflows. Rather than relying on a cloud service or requiring users to upload context repeatedly, it lives inside Codex, the coding agent platform, and keeps every project on the user's disk with zero extra API keys.

The tool ships with 118 ready-made visual systems: 45 curated deck templates across 15 professional categories (reports, product, brand, architecture, and others) plus 73 community-contributed styles organized into 12 groups (reports, infographics, diagrams, data & maps, dashboards, posters, product, brand, architecture, photography, editorial, illustration). It also includes 24 guided workflows across six groups (zero-to-one decks, source-to-slides, data stories, deep research, redesign, localization, training, keynotes, and more).

The core workflow flows from a prompt or file attachment through a series of checkpoints. After describing what you want to build, you can attach source files, choose an engine and output settings, or jump into a guided scenario. The tool then opens a durable project in the Codex browser where you clarify the brief (audience, page count, aspect ratio, language, resolution, and visual intent). Optional multi-round web research can feed into a Markdown outline, which you can then edit slide by slide—adding, removing, or reordering slides and revising talking points. Once the outline is locked, Codex Slides ranks the 73 community styles against your topic and outline, and you choose one, search the full library, or keep the default.

Rendering happens progressively or in parallel. Fast mode fans pages out in parallel and queues overflow, generating a 10+ slide deck in approximately 4–5 minutes while the outline and visual direction remain locked. As slides land in the canvas, you can edit in place: ask the AI to revise a page, mark a region directly on the slide, rewrite or redraw, add or reorder slides, set transitions, replace images, and prepare speaker notes. When ready, you present from any slide using Presenter Mode (which syncs an audience window, notes, navigation, and timer), or export a production-ready PPTX or print-ready PDF.

Exported files support 1K/2K/4K render quality and five aspect ratios (16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 9:16, 3:4). Each slide is image-native—composed as a full visual canvas—so exported PPTX files contain full-slide images rather than individually editable PowerPoint shapes. This prioritizes visual fidelity and rapid iteration over traditional shape-based editing.

Installation is straightforward: `codex plugin add codex-slides@codex-slides`. From there, you start a new Codex task like "Open Codex Slides and build me a 6-slide deck about [topic]" and watch it happen live. The product includes a media and creator kit with boilerplate, statistics, comparisons, an FAQ, and ready-to-post copy in English, Chinese, and Japanese, plus video scripts and asset manifests—designed so that other agents can use the kit to write articles or videos about Codex Slides itself.

Codex Slides addresses a core friction point in AI-assisted design: the black-box problem. Traditional one-shot slide generators (like Gamma or Tome) accept a request, hide the work, and return a finished file—forcing users to discover problems only after export and restart the entire process if the output misses the mark. Codex Slides inverts this by treating the presentation as a durable, on-disk project that remains visible and steerable throughout the workflow.

The tool's architecture keeps every step transparent. Users describe a deck, optionally attach source files or code, review and edit the outline, choose from 73 community visual styles (or 45 curated templates), watch slides render progressively in the browser, and make mark-based edits before export. All state persists to disk, so the same project stays synchronized whether accessed from the Codex browser or another tool, and interrupted work can resume safely. This approach trades the speed of a single-request generator for control and clarity—a significant shift for teams that need to iterate or preserve brand consistency.

Codex Slides runs on the user's existing Codex login and keeps projects locally, eliminating the need for separate API keys or cloud dependencies. The breadth of shipped templates (45 across 15 categories) and community styles (73 across 12 groups) plus 24 guided scenarios suggests the tool is designed to cover common use cases—from startup pitch decks and market reports to editorial layouts and data dashboards—without requiring deep design skill. The emphasis on "agent-native" positioning and the inclusion of CLI and MCP (Model Context Protocol) support signals an intent to integrate tightly into developer and coding-agent workflows rather than stand alone as a traditional app.

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