§ 01 · The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Every AI niche feed is filling with the same carousel aesthetic -- clean HTML slides, same font weight, same rounded cards, zero visual personality. The creator opens by naming the culprit directly: pure Claude Code HTML output, applied without restraint, is the source of the sameness. The fix is not a better prompt -- it is a different tool for the one slide that matters.
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 03:04
01 · Problem: HTML carousels all look the same
Hook and pattern interrupt. Shows examples of generic Claude Code carousels on Instagram. Previews the hybrid approach with a proof-of-concept carousel that got 18K likes.
03:04 – 05:12
02 · Step 0: Build a visual inspiration library
Search Instagram and TikTok for carousel, screenshot covers and body slides you like. Look outside your niche. Spend 20-30 minutes minimum. Pick one reference image to build from today.
05:12 – 06:00
03 · Step 1: Install the Higgsfield CLI
Install via npm, auth login, add skills. Create a named carousels folder. Explains why folder naming compounds value over time as template library grows.
06:00 – 11:29
04 · Step 2: Generate the cover image
Give Claude Code the reference screenshot plus a prompt describing what to change. Specify image model, aspect ratio, quality, request 4 variants. First pass gets aesthetic right but drops the text. Second pass adds title with gradient. Pick winner.
11:29 – 18:23
05 · Step 3: Build body slides in HTML
Feed Claude Code a reference body slide screenshot. It builds 5 HTML slides, auto-researches plugin copy, and includes a browser tweak panel. Export tweaks as JSON, paste back in. Add GitHub screenshots to individual slides for visual proof.
18:23 – 19:46
06 · Final thoughts
Recaps the three-step system. Notes that at 30-60 carousels built the template library does most of the work. CTA to community for pre-built skills.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:38
list
Hybrid Carousel System
- Step 0: Build a swipe file of inspiration (outside your niche)
- Step 1: Install Higgsfield CLI
- Step 2: Generate cover image with AI image model (iterate on reference screenshot)
- Step 3: Build body slides via Claude Code HTML with browser tweak loop
Three-step repeatable process that uses AI image generators only for the high-value cover slide and HTML for the body slides.
Steal for Any content creator building social carousels at scale
01:45
concept
Cover vs Body Slide Split
Only the cover image needs expensive generative model output because it is the scroll-stopper. Body slides can be HTML because the reader is already committed.
Steal for Deciding where to spend AI generation budget in any multi-image content workflow
05:23
concept
Template Library Compounding
Create a named folder for all carousels. After 30-60 carousels you have 10-15 proven templates. Future carousels become copy-swaps rather than full builds.
Steal for Any repeatable content format where templates compound over time
Lines you could clip.
00:02
"Claude code sucks at carousels, and it's your fault."
02:10
"Four of these six were very clearly created with Claude Code. They have the HTML slide deck feeling -- very, very samey."
18:30
"When it comes time to build carousel number 20, you don't even have to go through all this trouble. You just change the copy."
Things they pointed at.
01:05toolGPT Images 2
01:50toolNano Banana Pro
18:28toolImpeccable Claude Code plugin
Word for word.
00:00Claude code sucks at carousels, and it's your fault. Right now, social media is drowning in low quality Claude code created carousels that get zero engagement.
00:10And that's because they all look exactly the same, and they're all just made with pure HTML. And this is a major problem if you're someone who is trying to leverage AI in your social media marketing because carousels are one of the highest converting forms of social media content out there today.
00:25So in this video, I'm gonna help you out by showing you how to break out of this trend with a hybrid approach that takes the best of Claude code and its HTML assets and combines it with outside image models like GPT images too and Nano Banana Pro to create carousels that actually work.
00:43So when we talk about carousels that convert, I'm talking about something like this. This is a post I made about five weeks ago, hundreds of thousands of views. We got about 18,000 likes on this post, and it is the perfect example of this sort of hybrid approach I'm going to teach you about.
00:56First of all, when we talk about carousels, we need to think about the cover image. This is the first thing people are going to see, and this needs to be the most visually striking.
01:05What you see here was created with GPT images too, and it is with this cover image that we are going to lean on outside tools, whether that is GPT images too or something like Nano Banana Pro. As we then scroll through the rest of the carousel, when we look at, like, the body slides or the value slides, this is where something like HTML assets created by Cloud Code itself are perfectly fine.
01:28You already hooked them with the cover slide. We got them in here. Now we need to give them some actual value, and there isn't as much of an emphasis on
01:37it being visually stunning. We just need to provide value, and we need to be able to do this in a way that is repeatable, that we can do over and over and over again in a systemized manner in a relatively quick amount of time. That's also inexpensive because remember,
01:50it isn't free to create these images with something like GPT images too or Nano Banana Pro. I can't do that for every single image. Well, I mean, I could, but it's just gonna take forever.
02:01Right? We need to balance speed with quality. And I have found after doing this over and over again myself that this is the best way to approach
02:10carousels in AI and social media. And we talk about social media being flooded with these low quality carousels. You know what I'm talking about, especially if you're in the AI niche here.
02:18Four of these six that you see right here were very clearly created with Cloud Code. I don't even need to point them out to you. Right?
02:23They have the HTML, like, slide deck feeling like very, very samey, and you're only gonna see more and more of this. So if you want yours to convert, you have to figure out something that stands apart. And so as I just alluded to you, it's a two part process.
02:38First is going to be the cover image. That's where we use the AI image generation. For today, I'm gonna be showing you how to do this using the Higgs Field CLI.
02:46I like the Higgs Field CLI because it gives me a way to access any AI image generator tool, whether that is Nano Banana, GPT images too, or whatever else comes out next week that's on top, and do it via the terminal. And the second part is the body slides via Claude code using HTML assets.
03:04But first, before we start building anything, we need to find inspiration. We need to actually do some research, see what's working when it comes to carousel formats outside of your niche especially
03:13so we have something to build off of. If you just try to do all of this from blank slate, I promise you, you're gonna struggle, and it's gonna take you a ton of time. Why are we starting from scratch?
03:22Just see what works and don't copy them, but take inspiration. And where do you find it? Well, you find it on social media.
03:29And so the easy thing to do is just go to Instagram, go to TikTok, search for Carousel, that's all I put in up here, and start scrolling and seeing what jumps out at the page to you. What are you attracted to visually? What do you think looks cool?
03:43That's what we're gonna do. And if I see something I like, I'm going to do two things. One,
03:49I'm just going to click on it and take a screenshot of the cover image,
03:55and then I'm gonna do the same thing on the body. I'm gonna kinda take a look at the body slide, see if it's something I like, and I'm gonna screenshot that as well. And if this is your first time doing this, frankly, you should do this for at least like twenty to thirty minutes, And you need to start building a library
04:11of visual inspiration. I myself have an entire folder dedicated to carousel inspiration, and it's not all AI stuff.
04:18Frankly, you should be looking at stuff outside of your niche that you can bring to your niche. Because if I'm just doing the same thing as everyone else in the AI space or you're doing everything that everyone else is doing in your space, it's not gonna stand out. So it's always great to see what other people are doing in completely different domains.
04:34So step zero, inspiration. I want you to start building that library. And for today's video, I want you to hone in on one specific one that you would like to use your template off of for the carousel we're gonna build today.
04:46The next step, step one, is to install the Higgs Field CLI. Again, this gives you access to all of the different image and video generators that are out there. So you'll just head to higgsfield.ai,
04:56go to the MCP and CLI tab, click over here to the CLI. There is an MCP as well, but I do prefer the CLI.
05:02And then you're just going to install it by using this command. You're then going to run Higgs field auth login to actually log in to your account, and then you can add these skills as well.
05:12So now let's talk about creating these carousels. Now first things first, you wanna create a folder for your carousels. I call mine Chase AI carousels.
05:19Doesn't matter what you call yours. The reason for this is long term, you wanna start building a library of your own carousels that have performed well.
05:28We just did the whole thing, right, where we're looking through all these ones for inspiration. Well, imagine after you've created thirty, forty, fifty, sixty carousels and you know you have, like, 10 or 15 templates that always work. Well, being able to create carousels later down the line becomes infinitely easier because then you can just tell Cloud Code, hey.
05:47Go do carousel version 10. We're now gonna do it on this topic. Blah blah blah blah blah.
05:51So you're gonna start building that foundation today here. But today, since we have nothing, we need to start with some inspiration. So what we're going to do is we're going to take a screenshot of the title page we like, that we are trying to do ourselves.
06:04Now I found this title slide for inspiration, so this is what I'm going to be used. And the topic I'm gonna be talking about for my carousel are the top five Claude code plugins for June.
06:15And so with the screenshot of that image put into Claude code, I'm now going to prompt something along the lines of, hey. Here's the image I wanna use as inspiration. Use the Higgs field CLI.
06:26Use this particular image model. We'll use GPT images too. And then I'm gonna go into how I want it to differ from the original image.
06:33So I want you to use this Higgs field CLI to create a cover image for my new carousel that's going to be about the top five Claude code plugins for June. That's the title I want on the page, top five Claude code plugins for June.
06:48I want to use the screenshot that I just gave you as a reference image. So I want it to be essentially exactly the same as that image, but swap
06:59the current woman
07:02who's sort of the statue in the middle, change it to a male so we switch it up a little bit, but keep everything else the same in terms of aesthetics. What I want also changed is I don't want those things to be Photoshop icons.
07:14Just have them be like GitHub icons or Anthropic icon instead.
07:20I want you to use GPT images too. I want you to use an aspect ratio that's as close to four to five as possible. I want it to be high quality.
07:28I want it to be two k, and I want you to have it create four images. And once they're done, go ahead and bring them up for me. So now it's gonna go ahead and start building it for me.
07:37So I told it the reference image. I told them how I want it changed. Because remember, we look at it, I'm basically saying change the statue to be something that's male, get rid of the Photoshop icons to be like GitHub icons, and then change the actual text.
07:51Beyond that, I told it which image model to use, GPT images too, and then gave it some, you know, instructions in terms of the quality.
07:59Now if you don't know what sort of inputs you need to give for a particular image model, say you're using Nano Banana Pro instead of GPT images two, Cloud Code knows. It has the skills. It has the CLI, so it can tell you what it thinks is best.
08:11The biggest thing is to get that just prompt correct in terms of what you wanna change. Now the other thing you need to remember is, especially at the beginning, when you're just getting started here, you're probably gonna have to do this a few times.
08:23It's gonna give us an image back. We're probably gonna edit it. So there's this iterative creative process.
08:28It's very rare that you one shot these things. And that's why we do this purely for the title page. Imagine going through this process for each and every slide, each and every image in your carousel, which could be up to, 10 images.
08:39It just takes too long. That's why we do this only on the title, and the rest of this we do much quicker via HTML.
08:46So here are the images it came back with. First thing, it's missing the actual text. But I would say overall,
08:55not bad in terms of, like, the general vibe we're going for. I like how the statue came out. I like how the icons came out.
09:01We could nitpick the icon with Anthropic a little bit. Maybe the cream looks a little different, but it kinda has what we're going for.
09:09If we can just imagine the text being put up there, I would be happy with this. We even have some shadowing and things like that. And if we compare it to the original, and I'll hop off screen for a little bit, pretty close.
09:19Right? Like, you can see where the inspiration came from. There's a little bit more going on with the original.
09:25Right? They would have another icon up in the top left, but I like it. I think if we now just add the text here, I would be totally happy.
09:31To be honest, not totally sure why the text disappeared, but pretty easy move going forward. Right? And you actually have two options here.
09:38The first one is we take this cover one because I like this one out of the four it produced. We just feed it back into Cloud Code and we say, hey, just keep everything the same. All I want you to do is add the text to the top.
09:51The other option is you could bring this into something like Canva if you wanna be a little more hands on. The choice is yours. But for today's video, we're going to give it this image and say, hey.
10:00Add the text for top five skills or top five plugins for Claude Code in June and, like, highlight some portion of it so it has sort of that, you know, like, rainbow effect we see along the eyes. So I like this image we came up with, but I wanted to add the text.
10:15And I wanted to emulate the text from the original image we use as the reference image. So remember for the title, the text I want is it to say the top five Claude code plugins for June.
10:28And then some portion of that should have sort of that, like, rainbow gradient, the same sort of thing that's going along our statue's eyes, so to speak.
10:38So go ahead and do that and create four versions of that as well. And that's pretty much how that back and forth needs to go when you go through this. You don't need to overcomplicate it.
10:46Just say what you want. Ask for multiple images. It can do four at a time.
10:50Actually, I believe it can do up to 16 at a time, but I found four is kind of a good middle ground. We'll see what it comes back with. Here's what we got when we told it to add the text.
10:58So like I said, we got four options. Of the four, I think I like this one the
11:04best. If I had more time, I would probably edit this maybe a little bit more, maybe add some sort of, like, drop shadow to the text itself to give it a little bit more of a pop, but
11:14you can kinda go on forever and ever trying to get something you like. But I think this is good enough for now. If I saw this when I was scrolling through my own Instagram Instagram or or TikTok TikTok or whatever, and I saw this as a cover image, I would stop.
11:25So once we have the cover image locked in, now we can go into the body slides. And remember, when we talk about the body slides, this is just everything after
11:33the title slide. And some things we wanna keep in mind is we don't have a lot of room to operate here. So, like, this single slide.
11:42Right? We have one image. We kinda have a title, and then we have, like, one or two lines of text to work You don't you kinda wanna treat this almost like you would a normal slide deck with PowerPoint.
11:51We don't wanna fill it with text. Images are good. We all love images.
11:55Come up with some sort of title, and then you get, like, you get a couple sentences. So, you know, economy of action is really big here. But what you need to think about is, okay, what are the images going to be?
12:07What is the general background gonna be? And what is the text going to be? Now the great thing here is this is almost entirely done with HTML.
12:14So Cloud Code generates all of this on its own with one exception, that being these screenshots. So
12:21I gave Cloud Code these screenshots you see for a lot of these things. Well, for some of these things. So this was a screenshot I gave and I told to put it in there.
12:28This was a screenshot I gave it, but it can also create its own. So this thing showing like a terminal, Claude code created all of that. I didn't do anything.
12:37So in this portion, what we need to do is we need to figure out what we want these slides to look like and then we're going to, just like we did with the cover slide, have sort of an iterative process. But we can get a lot more hands on because what I'm gonna show you is we're gonna have Cloud Code create these HTML slides for us, but we're gonna bring it up in our browser, and we can actually do tweaks.
12:55Like, we can actually go in there, change the text, move stuff around, tell it to make edits. So we get even more control than we do with the title slide. But just like the title slide, this is where we can also use inspiration.
13:07So let's say I wanted to copy what I've done here and one of mine already or you wanted to copy one of mine. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna take a screenshot.
13:15We're gonna paste it in here, and now I'm gonna give it a prompt, something saying like, hey. Now let's kinda work on the title. Now let's look on the body slides.
13:21We've got the title slides done. Here's sort of what I'm looking at. I wanna do some pure HTML.
13:26Can we bring it up in the browser? Now I'm just sort of doing these prompts raw. All these prompts I'm giving Claude Coden now could also be skills because we can totally codify all this.
13:36Now I have my own personal set of skills for all these things as well as examples of my very own carousels, you can get all that inside of my community.
13:44I'll put a link to that in the pinned comment. But if you're doing this on your own, this is what it should kinda sound like. Now let's move into doing the body slide.
13:53So we have the title slide locked in. I like what we did there. Now with the body slide, it's going to be HTML.
13:57This image you saw is what I wanna use as inspiration. I kinda wanna use this as a template for how we do our body slides. I like the textile.
14:05I like the background. I like all that. So I wanna create
14:09the body slides. I want it to be HTML. I want you to be able to pull up this HTML in the browser, and I wanna be able to do the tweaks.
14:15So I wanna be able to move things around, change font size, change the actual text there, be able to do it via the browser. If I have to copy over the JSON, When I make those edits, so be it, but I want it to be as easy as possible. And for the five body slides, I want them to relate to the the five plugins for June.
14:33So for example, five plugins we can do. Let's do for one of them.
14:36Let's do caveman. Next one, we'll do the codex plugin.
14:41Third one, let's do impeccable. And then come up with the fourth and fifth plugin on your own, and then bring it up once you've done that.
14:49So I went ahead and built the slides, told us the five plugins it created, and then also created this tweak loop thing. So we're bringing up here inside of the browser. You can see it.
14:59So remember, what did we gave it? We gave it a screenshot of my carousel I created here.
15:05So relatively similar. You can see it tried to emulate, like, the Anthropic logo back here. I could easily feed Claude Code an actual image of the Anthropic logo and have it base it off that.
15:16But we have sort of this pillow up here, plug in number one, caveman mode. And also, I didn't tell it what caveman was. Remember, it on its own did its research, took a look at GitHub, created all the copy for us.
15:30I didn't give it any copy. And it went ahead and did this for pretty much everything. And you can see here on the bottom, you know, this little, like, terminal thing it created, relatively simplistic because, again, it's just working off its own HTML assets.
15:42I didn't give it any sort of screenshots. But the real power of this is over here on the tweaks. So this idea kinda spawned from Claw Design, which also has its own sort of tweak mode.
15:50So I thought, hey. Why don't we just start implementing something like this, which is fairly easy to do when we do our carousel? So I can change, you know, the headline size, the body size,
16:02you know, the opacity in the background, and then I can really easily, you know, change stuff on the fly.
16:09Right? This is the power of doing everything through HTML versus having to do it all through an AI image generator. And anything on here, can adjust.
16:17Right? The card, we can adjust to tilt, everything. Now if I change something,
16:24when it creates this tweak thing for you, again, I have my exact skill for it in the school community, but if you do this yourself, it's probably gonna say, hey. Like, when you make these changes, you need to export your tweaks.
16:34So there's export tweaks on the bottom, which is just in JSON. So anytime we make a change, and I can do this on multiple slides at once, I just export the tweaks, go back into here, and then paste them directly into
16:47Claude code, and then it's gonna update it on its own. So really easy to change stuff. And, like, from here,
16:53what are we gonna do? Well, we're just gonna go through the slides. We're gonna see if it matches our vision.
16:57You know? Is it, like, too wordy, not wordy? Is it talking about the right things?
17:01And then I think where you can really, like, add to this is adding screenshots to things. So
17:08for example, what's what's something we have here? Caveman mode. So I can go to the caveman GitHub.
17:13And it could be as simple as me, like, taking a screenshot of this image, going into Claude code, pasting the image in there, and saying, hey.
17:22Can we add this image to the caveman slide as the caveman image instead of whatever you created?
17:30And then we would just repeat that process over and over and over. And you can see it added the caveman image here and it's pretty big so I can just, you know, move it around till I get something I like.
17:43And furthermore, you can also tell Cloud Code to go out on the Internet and find appropriate images for all these things too. It isn't just HTML or screenshots. Like,
17:51you can get pretty creative here. And at this point, we would just repeat this process over and over till we get something we like. Again, in terms of creativity, a lot of it's gonna come from the inspiration you found.
18:03Mine was this one, but just like I talked about before where we go into actually searching for carousels on Instagram, we did it for the cover image. You can look at all their body slides as well. And that's pretty much it in terms of how to do it.
18:14Now to make it look good, you know, creative stuff, depends on what you're talking about. But, like, that's the Claude code piece of it. That's the building side of it, and it's very simple.
18:23And again, like I talked about earlier, you're just gonna do this for all your carousels, and they're all gonna have different templates. And so when it comes time to,
18:31you know, build carousel number 20 when you've been doing this over and over and over again, you don't even have to go through all this trouble we've gone through at this point of like, alright. Find the inspiration. Do these tweaks.
18:39Like, it's already kinda prebuilt. You just change the copy. And so it is through this three step process of finding inspiration,
18:46creating the cover image with outside AI image models, and then three, creating the body slides with HTML that we get a sustainable and repeatable process that kinda gives us the best of both worlds.
18:58We get all the cool creativity and all the cool imagery with the AI image models, get the HTML as kind of the backbone, but it's easy enough to execute that we can do this at scale over and over and over and not be sitting at the computer for hours every day.
19:11So with all that in mind, that is where I'm going to leave you today. I hope this shed some light on how to create carousels that are just a bit better, I think, than what you see out there.
19:20Don't fall into the, oh, all's you need is this single skill inside of Claude Code trap. We we can do a bit more. And, again, it isn't that much more work.
19:29You just have to build a foundation. So as always, let me know what you thought. Make sure to check out chase.ai+
19:36if you wanna get your hands on my Claude code masterclass as well as all my skills and examples of my carousels. That is inside the pinned comments. Besides that, I'll see you around.
— full transcript
§ 05 · For Joe
The cover image is the only slide worth obsessing over.
WHAT TO LEARN
The reason AI carousels all look the same is that people use the same tool the same way -- fixing that requires one different decision at the one moment it matters.
- Only the cover slide determines whether someone stops scrolling; body slides deliver value to a reader already inside, so they can tolerate HTML.
- Looking for inspiration outside your niche gives you a visual vocabulary your audience has never seen in your context -- within-niche inspiration just produces faster convergence to the same aesthetic.
- Prompting with a reference image plus specific deltas (change X, keep Y) produces more reliable results than describing a cover from scratch.
- AI image generators routinely drop text from their output; treating the text addition as a separate second pass is faster than trying to get both right at once.
- A browser-based tweak panel that exports JSON turns subjective style changes (font size, opacity, card tilt) into versioned edits that Claude Code can apply precisely.
- The value of a template library is not the templates themselves -- it is that every iteration narrows what good looks like for your brand, making future carousels faster to approve.
- Claude Code will research factual copy (plugin descriptions, feature details) on its own when you name a subject; you do not have to write body slide text yourself.
