Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool

Teachers need less slide work, not more slide software

If you teach, you already know the problem. The hard part is not picking a template. The hard part is turning a messy lesson plan into something students can follow at 8:30 in the morning, then adjusting it after the first class when you realize the second example confused everyone.

That is why the phrase "Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool" lands differently from a normal product launch. It sounds like somebody got tired of spending Sunday night moving text boxes around. It sounds like the tool started with a classroom problem, not a pitch deck problem.

Most teachers do not need slides that look like a startup keynote. They need structure, readability, speed, and a way to reuse material. They also need to share the result with students who may be on school laptops, phones, tablets, or locked down accounts where downloading another file is annoying.

AI helps most when it drafts the lesson structure first

AI can be useful for presentations, but not because it magically knows your class. It helps because blank slides are slow. Starting from a topic like "photosynthesis for 7th grade" or "World War I causes in 12 minutes" is easier when the first draft already has an intro, a few teaching points, examples, checks for understanding, and a closing recap.

The teacher still has to decide what belongs. A generated lesson can be too broad, too easy, too advanced, or just not the way you teach. A good AI presentation workflow should treat the draft as scaffolding. It gives you a first shape, then gets out of the way while you make it yours.

This is where editing matters more than generation. If every change requires opening a slide master, nudging boxes, fixing overflow, and re-exporting, the AI saved five minutes and created ten minutes of cleanup. A useful tool should let you click a heading, rewrite it, remove a section, add an example, or edit the Markdown source when text is faster than pointing.

A link is often better than a file for classroom materials

The old workflow ends in a file: PowerPoint, PDF, Word doc, spreadsheet, or some exported copy. Files work, and PowerPoint is still excellent for detailed control, offline presenting, and compatibility with school systems. Google Slides is strong for collaboration. Canva is great when visual polish matters. Those tools are popular for good reasons.

But a file is not always the best final form. Students lose attachments. District devices block downloads. A deck in the learning management system may show up differently on a phone. If you fix one typo after sharing, there may be five old versions floating around. A link solves a lot of those small problems.

Plain's bet is simple: the output should be a web page first. A deck, doc, or sheet becomes a shareable page that opens in the browser. You can present from the browser, send the link to students, update the page later, and export .pptx only when you need a fallback for a specific school workflow.

Click to edit beats template wrestling after the draft exists

Teachers edit in small bursts. You notice one phrase is too wordy. You want to swap an example for one your students will understand. You need to turn a dense slide into two simpler ones. These are not design projects. They are quick teaching decisions.

That is why click to edit matters. In Plain, the page is not just a static export. You can click elements and change them directly, while still having Markdown underneath for bigger edits. That combination is useful because teachers move between two modes all the time: direct visual fixes and fast text rewriting.

Markdown also makes lessons more reusable. A unit overview, reading guide, lab instruction sheet, or vocabulary review can start as plain text and become a polished page. You are not trapped inside a binary slide file where copying structure between lessons feels clumsy.

The best AI presentation tool should respect teacher judgment

There is a bad version of AI for teaching where the tool tries to sound authoritative and fills slides with generic explanations. That is not enough. Teachers know the class context: what students have already learned, which examples landed, who needs more scaffolding, and which standards actually matter this week.

A better tool should make teacher judgment faster to apply. It should help with the first outline, the sequence, the wording, and the conversion into a presentable format. It should not pretend the teacher is optional. In practice, the teacher is the editor, the reviewer, and the person who knows whether the lesson will work in the room.

This also means being honest about limits. AI can draft a clean lesson outline, but it can make mistakes. It can oversimplify. It can miss local curriculum requirements. Before using any generated content with students, you still need to read it, adapt it, and check facts. The win is not removing that work. The win is reducing the mechanical work around it.

Show HN is the right audience for a classroom first workflow

Hacker News readers tend to ask hard questions: Why does this need to exist? What is different from PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva, Gamma, or Tome? Is the AI part useful, or is it just a wrapper around slide generation? Those are fair questions, especially in a crowded category.

The answer should not be "because AI." The answer should be the workflow. Plain is different when the final artifact is a web page you share as a link, when edits happen by clicking the content, when Markdown remains available, and when .pptx export is treated as a fallback instead of the center of the product.

For a teacher, that difference is practical. A lesson can start as a rough idea, become a structured deck, turn into a browser presentation, and then live as a link for review after class. That is a better fit for how classroom material actually moves now: across devices, through chat, inside learning portals, and back to students after the bell rings.