Jack Tar your Claude Code Deckhand

Claude is good, but it needs help from Jack

The “superpowers” for Claude Code are brilliant, they create effective decks that have a reasonable impact. Gamma.app is amazing, it creates phenomenal slides using Nanobanana that look like you’ve had a design team working on them for months. So I thought “what if I could give Gamma style skills but in a Claude Code superpower way?” and then I thought “I’d really like to have proper Microsoft SmartArt in the deck” and so Jack Tar was born.

/plugin add marketplace SteveGJones/jack-tar-deckhand
# Then here are the plugins you will be able to install:
    jack-tar-cloud Plugin · jack-tar · ✔ enabled                                                                                                                                                                  
    jack-tar-custom-smartart Plugin · jack-tar · ✔ enabled                                                                                                                                                        
    jack-tar-deckhand Plugin · jack-tar · ✔ enabled                                                                                                                                                               
    jack-tar-msft-smartart Plugin · jack-tar · ✔ enabled                                                                                                                                                          
    jack-tar-ollama Plugin · jack-tar · ✔ enabled                                                                                                                                                                 
    jack-tar-superpower-bridge Plugin · jack-tar · ✔ enabled   

Jack Tar is a Claude Code plugin that can go solo on creating decks or collaborate with the Anthropic Superpower. Doing this taught me a few things about just how complex future development environments are going to get and the sort of phenomenal powers, and significant risks, that will bring. So this post will be a two parter, this one is going to be about Jack Tar, the next about what I learned.

Together or Alone?

The first decision to make when using Jack Tar is whether or not you want to use the superpower or not, if you want a full Jack Tar created deck, then you’ll want to work with the deck conductor agent, if you want it to collaborate with the superpowers then you’ll want to use the bridge agent.

# Bridge agent
/jack-tar-superpower-bridge:bridge-brief
# jack-tar only
/jack-tar-deckhand:deck-assembler

I’d actually suggest you start with bridge agent, because that tests out a more complex challenge, but feel free to go ham either way.

Tell me a story

Every good deck starts with a narrative, so I’ve created a skill that helps with narratives, it gives you choices of different narratives given what you want to present, then you choose the narrative flow that you want, and the size of the deck you want. This then works with the orchestrator, or the bridge, to build out the deck, but the specifics you probably care about are the new features you can add to generated decks.

SmartArt

Microsoft SmartArt is one of those simple things that make you really wonder why everyone hasn’t copied it. Its very simple process:

Now Microsoft haven’t released into Open Source every single one of their SmartArt templates, but under an MIT license there are certainly enough to get started with, if you want lists, processes, cycles, etc there is at least one option and overall we’ve got 27 different SmartArt options that can be created. Here is an example of Jack Tar SmartArt in action.

Ollama images

Next up we have a feature I like because it runs locally, it's the ability to use Ollama image generation models to create images for your decks locally on your machine.

Do these compete with the public models?

Yes, yes they do.

Are they as good when it comes to complex text heavy scenarios?

No, no they are not.

But if you just want a generated image of a wolf walking down a street

Well its pretty good for that, running on my laptop. Now this is a standalone plugin as well so you don’t need to have it in decks to work, you can just use it as a plugin on its own.

Drafting before the cloud

So one thing I use Ollama for is drafting before I spend money, I do some cycles on the local machine with prompts, with the reviewer agent and the orchestrator fully aware that it will never be perfect so text will be wrong for instance. This helps tune up a prompt pretty well. This way you can see how images look in the deck even if they aren’t perfect.

Reviewing out of context

Jack Tar reviews the decks and the images, but it doesn’t do it within the main context, as images are expensive and if you throw a bunch into the main context you’re going to have a very expensive session, so there is a dedicated agent that does the reviewing. This saves a lot of tokens, and also means you can have something tuned for just reviewing an image against the goal.

Cloud based images

So when you’re ready to pay the money then there are a few options:

1. Imagen
2. Nanobanana Flash & Pro
3. ImageGPT
4. Recraft
5. FLUX

I’m sure I’ll add more at some stage, but this is working pretty well for me so far. Part of the reason for supporting all of these options is cost, sometimes you don’t need to use the biggest model because your challenge is achievable with a smaller model, Jack Tar aims to pick the right model, and you can of course nudge it how you want.

Cloud drafting

Cloud drafting comes with three different strategies:

1. Low to high resolution
2. Cheap to Expensive model in the same family (nanobanana flash v pro)
3. Cheap to Expensive model in different families

I’ve focused on the first two in this release, but in future I can see strategy 3 being done as well.

Working with Super Powers

So one thing to shout out is how it worked with Super Powers, basically I’m nudging the super power to put in a holding area and tag it so I can then parse the PPTX it creates and add my information to where those tags are. I looked at using the JSON document it uses to create the PPTX but weirdly using the final generated doc seemed to work best. I can certainly see in future this being some sort of agent to agent collaboration, but that isn’t something that is done right now.

Jack Tar Deckhand — making it look like you spent more time than you did

So there you have it, a plugin to Claude Code that enables SmartArt and generated images (it also does some SVG generation for charts etc, but I’m not totally happy about how I’m doing that). My objective was that I wanted to take the Super Power decks and have something that had a bit more kick and wasn’t just a text only deck. The SmartArt addition also makes it MUCH easier to edit the slides than the way the super power creates them as individual boxes, which was another goal.

GitHub - SteveGJones/jack-tar-deckhand: Repo designed to add much more sophisticated PowerPoint skills to Agentic SDLCs by leveraging AI models and imaging tools

Give it a go, and tell me what you think, Jack Tar won’t be offended.