Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Annotated Presentation Creator. I've released a new version of my tool for creating annotated presentations. I use this to turn slides from my talks into posts like this one - here are a bunch more examples.

I wrote the first version in August 2023 making extensive use of ChatGPT and GPT-4. That older version can still be seen here.

This new edition is a design refresh using Claude 3.7 Sonnet (thinking). I ran this command:

llm \
  -f https://til.simonwillison.net/tools/annotated-presentations \
  -s 'Improve this tool by making it respnonsive for mobile, improving the styling' \
  -m claude-3.7-sonnet -o thinking 1

That uses -f to fetch the original HTML (which has embedded CSS and JavaScript in a single page, convenient for working with LLMs) as a prompt fragment, then applies the system prompt instructions "Improve this tool by making it respnonsive for mobile, improving the styling" (typo included).

Here's the full transcript (generated using llm logs -cue) and a diff illustrating the changes. Total cost 10.7781 cents.

There was one visual glitch: the slides were distorted like this:

The slide is distorted by being too high for its width

I decided to try o4-mini to see if it could spot the problem (after fixing this LLM bug):

llm o4-mini \
  -a bug.png \
  -f https://tools.simonwillison.net/annotated-presentations \
  -s 'Suggest a minimal fix for this distorted image'

It suggested adding align-items: flex-start; to my .bundle class (it quoted the @media (min-width: 768px) bit but the solution was to add it to .bundle at the top level), which fixed the bug.

Screenshot of an "Annotated Presentation Creator" web application. The interface shows: "Annotated Presentation Creator" header, "Create beautiful annotated slides for your presentations. See How I make annotated presentations for instructions." Below is an upload area with buttons "Choose Images", "Load Images", "Restore 64 saved items", and "OCR Missing Alt Text". The main area displays a presentation slide with "Building software on top of Large Language Models" by "Simon Willison - PyCon US 2025" dated "15th May 2025", alongside an alt text input field and annotation section containing "The full handout for the workshop parts of this talk can be found at building-with-llms-pycon-2025.readthedocs.io."