Try this 10-second test. Open your favorite slide builder, paste in a messy pile of notes, and hit generate. Now count the slides. Ten? Three equal bullets on every card? Congrats, you just met the generic default deck. Everyone gets the same one, and it probably looks a lot like the last deck you shipped and quietly hated.
A Redditor on r/PromptEngineering (u/CandidEquipment171) says the fix is simple: don’t let any tool make a single slide until the structure is locked in plain text. The tool isn’t broken. It’s just guessing, because you never told it what the deck is for. Here’s the challenge version.
🧪 The Challenge: Outline Before Slides
- Open any chat model. Not the deck builder. Just a chat.
- Paste this prompt: “You are a presentation strategist. Before writing any slides, ask me up to five questions about the audience, the one decision I want them to make, the single argument per section, and what to cut. Wait for my answers.”
- Answer the questions. Be honest, even when the honest answer is “I haven’t decided yet.” A vague answer is useful data, because it tells you exactly where the deck is still fuzzy. Short answers beat polished ones here. Two sentences each is plenty.
- Then ask for a slide-by-slide outline only. One idea per slide, a headline and the supporting point. No design, no filler. Write the headlines as full sentences that make a claim, like “Churn dropped 12% after we fixed onboarding,” not labels like “Churn Overview.” If you can read only the headlines top to bottom and follow the story, the outline is working.
- Only now open the builder and feed it the locked outline. Paste it in whole, and add a line telling the tool to keep the order and the headlines as written.
🔍 What the Results Mean
The thinking moves to a stage where editing is cheap. Fixing a sentence in plain text takes seconds. Unpicking a formatted card with three bullets, an icon and a background takes forever.
If the five questions felt annoying, that’s the point. They showed you gaps you would have papered over with a pretty layout. If you couldn’t name the one decision you want from the audience, the deck was never going to land. Think of it as a free stress test: every question you stumbled on is a slide that would have wandered, rambled, or quietly lost the room.
Here’s a quick way to read your outline. If two slides make the same point, merge them. If a slide makes two points, split it. If a slide doesn’t support the decision you named, it’s a cut candidate, however pretty you imagined it.
⚠️ The Snag Nobody Warns You About
The author notes that Gamma 5’s own agent asks clarifying questions before it generates, so the same principle is built in. But when they handed it an outline they had already locked, it over-restructured it. It merged sections they wanted kept apart, and they had to pin the order back.
Takeaway: builders still reshape an approved outline. Budget one pass to undo that. Tell the tool to keep the section order exactly as written, and check it before you celebrate. A fast way to audit: put your outline and the generated deck side by side and compare the headlines in order. Any slide that moved, merged, or vanished is a flag. Fix those first, then worry about colors and fonts.
💡 Extra Tips: Steal the Commenters’ Questions
The replies had some sharp ones:
- Who is the one person in the room whose “yes” matters, and what do they already believe?
- What should they do differently after the meeting? A decision, not “understand” something.
- What’s the one thing they must remember in the taxi on the way home?
- Which slide would you delete first?
Swap any of these into the prompt, or answer them yourself before you even open a tool. The “which slide would I delete” question is brutal in the best way. Try asking it twice: once before the outline, and once after. If the answer changes, your first draft had a weak spot you can now fix.
One more habit worth stealing: save your best question set as a reusable prompt. After two or three decks, you’ll have a personal checklist that gets sharper every time, and the blank-page panic basically disappears.
🏴☠️ Your Move
Run the outline pass on your next deck and watch how much less rework you do. Then tell us in the comments: what question do you force first? ⚓
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Which questions should I answer before I touch the outline?
Start with the one person in the room whose yes matters and what they already believe. Then pin down the decision you want them to make, written as an action and not as “understand X.” One commenter also asks what they must remember on the way out, which keeps the whole deck honest.
Q: How do I find the filler slides before I build anything?
Ask which slide you would delete if the talk were half as long. The one you hesitate over is usually the one that isn’t pulling its weight. Some people run the same check on the takeaway, asking what the room should repeat to someone later, and cut anything that doesn’t support it.
Q: Where should objections go in the outline?
Decide which objection will come up first and put your answer on the slide where it lands, not on a Risks slide at the end. By the time a room reaches the end, it has often already made up its mind. One commenter says this question changes the outline more than any other.
Q: How do I stop a builder from merging sections I want kept apart?
Add a note at the top of your outline, such as DO NOT MERGE SECTIONS, and say why the tension between those slides matters. One commenter says this helps sometimes but not every time. Plan on a manual pass to restore the order you locked in, especially where two slides build tension against each other.
Stop letting a deck tool generate from raw notes. Force an outline pass first
by u/CandidEquipment171 in PromptEngineering