AI skills

Demo Time ships Agent Skills that teach AI assistants how Demo Time works: the act file format, the moves, the slide layouts and the themes. Instead of guessing, the assistant reads the Demo Time reference that comes with the skill, and writes files that load and run.

The skills work with GitHub Copilot in VS Code, the Copilot CLI, Claude Code, and other assistants that support the SKILL.md format.

The skills

Skill	Ask for	What it does
demotime-talk-plan	”Help me plan a talk about X”	Interviews you when information is missing (audience, length, key messages, which parts need a live demo) and writes a talk plan in .demo/talk-plan.md.
demotime-slides	”Create slides about X”	Creates markdown slides in .demo/slides/ from the talk plan or your material, picks the layout that fits each slide, adds speaker notes, and adds the openSlide scenes to your act.
demotime-slide-theme	”Create a slide theme”	Creates a custom theme from brand colours, a logo, a website or a mood, plus header, footer or custom layouts when needed, and a preview deck with every layout. The CSS opens in the Theme Builder for fine-tuning.
demotime-code-demo	”Create a demo for this code”	Scripts a live coding demo as scenes and moves: a reset-able starting state, typing or patching the code, and highlights on what you explain. It uses placeholders instead of line numbers and validates the act against the JSON schema.

The skills build on each other: the talk plan feeds the slides and the demos. When you ask for slides without any material, the slides skill starts with the talk plan.

Tip

The slide theme and code demo skills come with a small Node.js script (Node.js 18 or later): one generates the theme CSS with the Theme Builder’s generator, the other validates your acts. Without Node.js, the assistant writes the CSS or checks the act by hand.

GitHub Copilot in VS Code

The skills are part of the extension. When Demo Time is installed, Copilot in VS Code loads them without any setup. Ask for what you need in the chat, or type / and pick one of the demotime- skills.

Note

Agent skills need VS Code 1.109 or later. In older versions, use the install command to add the skills to your project.

Install or update the skills

For assistants that don’t load the skills from the extension, like Claude Code or the Copilot CLI in your terminal, run the Demo Time: Install or update AI skills command. You can also find it in the ... menu of the Demo Time view.

1. Select the assistants: GitHub Copilot, Claude Code or Other agents.
2. Select where to install the skills:
   • Project: in the workspace, so you can share them with your team through source control.
   • User: in your home folder, for all your projects.

Assistant	Project	User
GitHub Copilot	.github/skills/	~/.copilot/skills/
Claude Code	.claude/skills/	~/.claude/skills/
Other agents	.agents/skills/	~/.agents/skills/

The command only replaces the demotime-* skill folders, so your own skills stay untouched. It writes a .demotime-skill.json file with the extension version in every skill folder. After an update of Demo Time, the extension finds skills from an older version and offers to update them.

Caution

Copilot in VS Code also reads .github/skills/, .claude/skills/ and .agents/skills/. When you install the skills in your project, Copilot sees them next to the skills of the extension.

Claude Code plugin

The Demo Time repository is also a Claude Code plugin marketplace, named demotime. Add it and install the presentation-skills plugin:

/plugin marketplace add estruyf/vscode-demo-time
/plugin install presentation-skills@demotime

The plugin is the demotime-skills.zip file of the latest release, so it has the same version as the extension. Claude Code prefixes plugin skills with the plugin name, for example /presentation-skills:demotime-slides. Run /plugin marketplace update demotime to get the latest version.

Other assistants

Download demotime-skills.zip from the latest release and copy the demotime-* folders from its skills folder into the skills folder of your assistant. Every skill folder has its own references and scripts, so copy the whole folder.

How the skills stay up to date

The reference files of the skills (references/ in every skill folder) are generated from this documentation, the act file JSON schema and the slide front matter JSON schema for every release, so the skills know the moves, layouts and themes of the version you use.