A Claude Skill for building polished, interactive HTML explainers as a single page OR a slide deck. Give it a topic, answer a few questions, and it produces a real page that someone can land on cold and come away understanding the basics.
It's a process, not a template: the quality comes from an iterative loop (research → architect for learning → 10× the visual design → render-and-actually-look → revise), not from filling in blanks.
See it in action: live examples gallery
Best results: run it in Claude Code with Opus 4.8 at high effort (or better). It's both faster and higher quality, since stronger first drafts mean fewer quality-loop fix cycles. Claude Code renders in a real headless browser, so it catches visual bugs the Claude App or Cowork cannot.
Given a topic (or your own source material), the skill:
- Scopes first — a short, must-ask interview: grounding, audience/depth, format (scrolling page vs slide deck), visual style, quiz, AI chat.
- Gets the facts right — grounds in your material and/or primary sources; cites them.
- Architects for learning — leads with one mental model, layers depth, builds around a single clear centerpiece.
- Hits a 10× visual bar — editorial typography, a semantic palette, real use of the horizontal space, and an explicit anti-"AI-slop" checklist (no emoji-as-icons, no decorative gradients, no generic bento grids).
- Shows, doesn't tell — favors small playable micro-demos over paragraphs.
- Runs a real quality loop — renders the page in a headless browser, screenshots it (desktop + mobile + interactive states), critiques it like a human, and fixes what's weak.
- Ships a real
.htmlfile with an optional in-page Review & edit overlay so non-technical reviewers can annotate or edit in place (and download a copy with both the edits and the notes embedded).
Built with this skill, hosted on GitHub Pages — each is a self-contained .html file:
| Explainer | Format | Live |
|---|---|---|
| Auroras: The Northern Lights | scrolling page | open |
| Gutenberg's printing press | slide deck | open |
| The Doppler effect (why a siren changes pitch) | scrolling page | open |
| The grammar of shadow (reading film noir) | slide deck | open |
| The EU AI Act | scrolling page | open |
| What "fair use" actually means | slide deck | open |
| How fractional reserve banking works | scrolling page | open |
Source lives in examples/.
SKILL.md the process (this is the skill)
scripts/shoot.mjs Playwright screenshot helper for the quality loop
scripts/review-mode.js drop-in "Review & edit" overlay (paste before </body>)
scripts/chat-dock.js drop-in BYOK "ask the page" chat widget
reference/ visual reference image for the design bar
examples/ explainers built with the skill (served via GitHub Pages)
index.html the examples gallery landing page
Claude Code — clone into your skills directory:
git clone https://github.com/ds-vibe/html-explainer ~/.claude/skills/html-explainerIt loads automatically when a request matches (e.g. "make an interactive explainer about X").
Heads up — a build takes 4–10 minutes. It's doing real work: research, a scoping interview, generation, and a visual quality loop. Claude Code renders the page in a headless browser (desktop + mobile screenshots) and iterates until it passes — this is where the quality comes from. The first run installs Playwright + Chromium (~100–200 MB, fully automatic). The Claude app / cowork has no headless browser, so it runs a rigorous static pre-flight instead and skips the install. (Best results: Opus 4.8 at high effort in Claude Code.)
Claude desktop / web app — download the prebuilt
html-explainer-skill.zip and upload
it under Settings → Capabilities → Skills, then start a fresh chat. (Or zip the skill files —
SKILL.md, scripts/, reference/ — yourself.)
Manual rendering (optional — the quality loop already does this for you):
node scripts/shoot.mjs "file:///path/to/page.html" /tmp/shots
# first time only, if you haven't run a build yet: npx playwright install chromiumMIT © 2026 Derek Schwede