ref-deck

ref-deck

Superseded by carousel-engine (October 2026). ref-deck built each deck on the layout of a proven top-performing deck. carousel-engine replaces that with a text-first pipeline for Claude Code: story spines, ranked hooks, a cold-reader check and a style library, decided in one brief card before any image exists, then headless Codex workers with real screenshots and logos composited in. This repo stays up as-is for anyone still using it, but it's no longer maintained.

Create Instagram carousels with Codex's built-in image generation, verified copy, and a visual direction chosen from references.

Start with three cover designs using the same approved headline. Compare them side by side, choose a direction, then build the remaining slides from that cover.

This is Chase AI's ref-deck production skill, now maintained for Codex. It produces portrait 4:5 slides delivered at 1080×1350. The usual deck is 8–9 slides including the cover and CTA, with a house cap of 10 unless requested otherwise.

Included files

Workflow

1. Research the content and references. Verify factual claims. Start with relevant successful posts from your own account, then reuse prior research and expand the search when useful. Record metrics with dates and distinguish design hypotheses from proven causes.
2. Draft the teaching arc and visible copy. Give each slide one clear lesson, supported by a real result or an illustrative example. Approving the headline and approving its visual treatment are separate decisions.
3. Generate three complete covers. Keep the approved wording and factual promise consistent while varying composition, type hierarchy, and image treatment. Finish compositing and phone-size checks before presenting A/B/C with a recommendation.
4. Select the cover, then generate interiors. Wait for the user's choice unless selection was explicitly delegated. Every interior uses the selected clean cover as its style reference. Inspect a representative interior before producing the rest.
5. Composite exact assets and inspect the deck. Real screenshots, logos, exact sprites, and applicable text fixes use the documented local compositing workflow. Check text, evidence, margins, identity, and readability at full size and phone size.
6. Deliver and preserve history. Keep the manifest, prompts, source plates, candidate covers, slide files, and contact sheet. Export only the approved deck slides to the final folder.

The three-cover count changes only when the user requests a different count or asks to reuse an approved style. Urgency alone does not skip selection. Small refinements apply to the chosen candidate; they do not require generating all three again.

Design principles

• References inform layout and hierarchy. Replace a third party's copy, branding, palette, typography, and characters with your own. Your own established brand can carry through a follow-up.
• A cover option must offer a meaningful visual choice. A colour swap or different headline line break alone does not qualify.
• Familiarity is useful when it supports a series. There is no fixed novelty quota or donor cooldown.
• Mascots, monitor frames, sticky notes, narration cards, and profile-card CTAs are optional tools, not a required template.
• Real proof and illustrative explanations have different roles. Never present a mock as evidence of an actual result.
• When a direction is rejected, update the brief, composition notes, prompts, manifest, and visual approval together. Retain the old attempts as history rather than accidentally reusing them.

Requirements and local resources

Use a Codex session with the built-in image-generation tool available. Built-in generation is the default for creation and edits; Higgsfield is used only when explicitly requested. If built-in generation is unavailable, report the limitation and ask before changing providers.

This repository contains the skill and both supporting guides. It remains a personal workflow reference: paths in SKILL.md point to Chase's local carousel-vault and chase-ai-carousels workspaces. The donor corpus, private performance research, brand sprites, historical decks, and worked-example compositing scripts are external resources and are not bundled here.

For your own setup, replace those paths with your reference library, verified source material, brand assets, output folder, and compositing tools. A canonical sprite is needed only if you choose to use that character. Read any historical example script before adapting it; some hardcode output paths for an old deck.

Install

For a new installation, clone the repository into your Codex skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/cth9191/ref-deck.git ~/.codex/skills/ref-deck

On Windows PowerShell:

git clone https://github.com/cth9191/ref-deck.git "$env:USERPROFILE\.codex\skills\ref-deck"

If that directory already contains a customized skill, review and preserve your changes before updating it. Adapt the local resource paths, then invoke $ref-deck or ask Codex to use ref-deck for a carousel.

Creating a deck does not authorize posting it, scheduling it, or sending DMs.

MIT © Chase. See LICENSE.