¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Problem statement: make a slides presentation for a certain business or academic use case.

Part I: What? #

Classic approach: pick one of: LibreOffice, Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides.

Hipster approach: pick one of: Notion, Reveal.JS (or similar), Golang present, Prezi.

Academic approach: LaTeX beamer, LyX.

Minimalist approach: Emacs Org mode, Terminal.

Of course, I am pioneering – by choosing none of the above!

We’ll settle with Typst + Polylux, because we want best-in-class™ presentations:

Polylux is a package for the typesetting system Typst to create presentation slides, just like you would use the beamer package in LaTeX. (So far, it is much less advanced than beamer, obviously.)

If you haven’t heard of things like LaTeX’s beamer before, here is how this works: As a rule of thumb, one slide becomes one PDF page, and most PDF viewers can display PDFs in the form of a slide show (usually by hitting the F5-key).

But first, a bit of trivia:

Why the name?

A polylux is a brand of overhead projectors very common in Eastern German schools (where the main author of this package grew up). It fulfils a similar function to a projector, namely projecting visuals to a wall to aid a presentation. The German term for projector is beamer, and now you might understand how it all comes together. (The original author of the aforementioned LaTeX package is German as well.)

Germans, Germans everywhere {picture the Buzz Lightyear meme here}

Part II: You are pretty and you know it #

I am not using the default theme. Sorry, that’s just not gonna happen.

Built-in beamer themes inspire me. I choose metropolis, with a few bits of beamer frankfurt sprinkled in (mainly the top navigation guides).

Such a short section, so cute! ✨

Part III: How? #

It’s 2026. Agentic LLMs are all the rage.

Obviously, we’re going to use Claude Code. It’s the obvious choice. Nothing else comes close.

OK, I’ll also give you a break if you use OpenAI, it comes in a close second. No other choice is possible. Not if you want to become state-of-the-art. Sorry.

Checklist:

• have claude code installed? Check
• have enough, readily available tokens to burn? Check
• have a workspace ready? Check
• have git init run in the workspace? Check
• have two claude code sessions open, one for content and one for form? Check
• have a Justfile ready? Check

watch:
        typst watch slides.typ

Part IV: The Future Starts With You #

Good luck out there!

Iterate. Tell the LLM what you want. Be verbose in your prompting. Course-correct as needed.

There’s no right or wrong from here.

Just do it!