This is not one prompt that spits out a carousel. It is a small assembly line with three stations, and each one is good at something the others are bad at. Once it exists you can feed it a topic at 11pm and open a finished folder of slides at 8am.
Carousels are the slowest format to make by hand and the strongest format on the two platforms most of us care about, which is exactly the combination that deserves a system.
curl -fsSL https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.sh | sh. Full instructions live in the Codex CLI docs. There is also a Codex app and an IDE extension if a terminal feels like too much.carousels. Inside it, make two empty folders: briefs and output. That is the whole file structure. Everything Claude writes goes in briefs, everything Codex renders lands in output.cd ~/Desktop/carousels and press enter, then type codex and press enter. It asks you to sign in with ChatGPT the first time. Codex can now read and write inside that folder and nowhere else, which is exactly the blast radius you want.brand.md file, then save it inside the carousels folder. Codex reads it on every build, forever.Your style file is the difference between slides that look like your account and slides that look like a template. Paste this into Claude, answer the questions honestly, and save what it writes as brand.md inside your carousels folder.
I want to build a reusable style file that a coding agent will use to render my Instagram and LinkedIn carousel slides, so it needs to be precise enough for a machine to follow with no taste of its own.
Before you write anything, interview me. Ask me for my exact hex colours (background, headline, accent, body text), my two or three fonts and where each one is allowed to appear, whether my headlines are lowercase or sentence case, how many words are allowed in a headline, whether I use photos or illustrations, and what my slide 1 and my final call-to-action slide look like. Ask about the boring mechanics too: canvas size, safe margins, and whether I use a progress indicator.
Then write me a file called brand.md that turns my answers into unambiguous rules a builder can pass or fail against. Write every rule as a checkable statement, for example "headline is 96 to 130px, maximum 3 lines" rather than "headlines are big". Include a short list of things that are banned in my brand, and end with a 10-point checklist the builder must verify on every single slide before it says it is finished.This is the station that decides whether the carousel is any good. Claude is writing copy, not design, so give it a topic and let it structure the whole thing. Save the output into your briefs folder as something like brief-01.md.
Write me a slide-by-slide carousel brief on this topic: [YOUR TOPIC]. My audience is [WHO THEY ARE] and the one thing I want them to walk away able to do is [THE OUTCOME].
Structure it as 8 slides. Slide 1 is the cover and it carries the entire hook, so give me the headline in under 9 words plus a one-line subtitle, and make the promise specific and checkable rather than vague inspiration. Slides 2 to 7 each teach exactly one idea: give me a short label, a headline, and 20 to 35 words of body copy that a real person would say out loud. Slide 8 is the call to action.
For every slide, output four labelled fields: LABEL, HEADLINE, BODY, and VISUAL, where VISUAL is a plain-English description of what should sit on the slide (an icon, a diagram, a screenshot, a mock chart) and roughly where it goes. Do not use em dashes anywhere. Do not repeat the same sentence shape on consecutive slides. When you are done, read your own draft back and tell me which single slide is the weakest and why, then rewrite that one.Now the fun part. In your Terminal window with codex running inside the carousels folder, paste this. It builds each slide as a small self-contained HTML file and then renders every one to a PNG, which is how you get real image files instead of a chat describing images.
Read brand.md in this folder, then read every file in the briefs folder and build each one into a finished set of carousel slide images.
For each brief: create one self-contained HTML file per slide at exactly 1080 x 1350 pixels, using only inline styles and locally available or Google-hosted fonts, laid out to follow every rule in brand.md. Then render each HTML file to a PNG using headless Chrome (or install Playwright if Chrome is not available) at that exact pixel size with no scrollbars and no browser chrome in the shot. Save the images into output/[brief-name]/ named slide-01.png, slide-02.png and so on, in reading order.
After you render each slide, open the PNG and check it against the 10-point checklist at the bottom of brand.md. If a slide fails a check, fix the HTML and re-render it before moving on. Text must never overflow its container or sit outside the safe margins, and no slide may be visually identical in layout to the slide before it.
Work through every brief without stopping to ask me questions. When you are completely finished, write a file called report.md that lists each brief, how many slides it produced, and any check that you could not make pass.Open the output folder and you will find one subfolder per brief, each holding numbered PNGs in swipe order, plus the report.md where Codex owns up to anything it could not fix. Read that report first, it tells you which slides need you.
brand.md as a rule. After three or four rounds the morning polish shrinks from twenty minutes to five, because the builder stopped making those mistakes.One carousel overnight is a neat trick. A week of them is why you build this. The move is to generate all the briefs in one Claude session so they are deliberately different from each other, then let Codex render the lot in a single unattended run.
I want a week of 5 carousels on this theme: [YOUR THEME]. My audience is [WHO THEY ARE].
Before you write anything, plan the set as a whole so the five do different jobs: give me one that teaches a process step by step, one that is a numbered list of tools or examples, one contrarian take that argues against something my audience believes, one that breaks down a real before-and-after, and one that answers the question they are too embarrassed to ask. Show me the five hooks first and wait for me to approve or swap any of them.
Once I approve, write all five as full slide-by-slide briefs in the exact same format: 8 slides each, with LABEL, HEADLINE, BODY and VISUAL fields per slide, and a cover headline under 9 words. Output each brief separately and clearly labelled brief-01 through brief-05 so I can save them as separate files. Vary the sentence rhythm between briefs so the set does not read like one template five times.brief-01.md through brief-05.md. Codex picks up whatever is in that folder, so this is your queue.I built this after losing one too many Sundays to nudging text boxes, and the surprise was that the AI was never the bottleneck. Taste was. The pipeline is very good at the mechanical 80%: structure, copy, layout, rendering, file naming, doing it five times without complaining. It is genuinely bad at the last 20% that makes a carousel look like it came from a person, which is why step three is a human step and stays one. Automate the part you resent, keep the part you are good at.