Austin JS Battle Deck
- Event
- AustinJS Meetup
- Overview
A creative battle deck for the December 2025 Austin JS holiday party. Using the PechaKucha format (20 slides, 20 seconds each), there's a secret to the slide order.
- Technologies
- CreativeCommunityImprovBattle DecksPechaKucha
What is Battle Decks?
Battle Decks (also known as PowerPoint Karaoke) is an improv comedy format where presenters see their slides for the first time on stage and must improvise a coherent narrative on the spot.
Austin JS uses the PechaKucha format: 20 slides, 20 seconds each, auto-advancing. No pausing, no going back. Total time: 6 minutes 40 seconds.
The Secret
This section reveals the hidden narrative woven through every slide of the battle deck.
If you might present this deck, don't peek!
Related notes
Agent Harness 101
Every coding agent is a short loop: ask the llm, run the tools it asks for, and stop when it asks for nothing. The harness is everything around that loop that keeps it safe and durable, and each of its primitives (session, thread, turn, tool, permission and agent) is written here as a real schema. Ends with a scripted demo that follows one message from the moment you press enter to the final answer.
Take the Keys Away From Your Agent
A process that runs model-authored code should hold no credential worth stealing and have no route to anywhere it could send one. Builds that from the bottom up: what TCP, HTTP and TLS actually are, how certificate authorities decide who you believe, and what a proxy can and cannot see. Ends with an interactive walkthrough of one request through every process that touches it, which you can rerun on a flat network to watch the whole thing become irrelevant.
AI Workflows That Don't Rot Your Codebase
AI is leverage only inside a disciplined loop — plan, devil's-advocate, execute, post-mortem, improve your skills. Let it push ahead unsupervised and the same tool quietly wrecks the project: drifting to mimic old code, writing docs that pass typecheck but lie, leaving half-refactors and parallel types behind. A field guide to the loop that ships and the anti-patterns that sink, with downloadable skills and a real brand-book deliverable.
Get in touch
Have a question about something I wrote, or want to talk? Send me a message.