Automate Instagram Carousels with Claude Code

I just automated carousel creation. Every time I ship something in my day to day, Claude Code turns it into a full on-brand Instagram carousel. Cover slide, steps, CTA, all of it. Ready to post. Not even exaggerating.. this thing has already saved me hours a week.

Carousels are crushing right now. They get saved more than any other format, the algorithm is rewarding them hard, and every big account on Instagram has gone all-in on them. But a good one takes 30 minutes if you actually care. So most people post bad ones or give up. I wanted a system that makes good ones automatically. So I built one.

Here is the workflow once it's set up. I finish a real task in my Claude Code project. Then I run one command. Claude looks at what I just built, pulls my top-performing past content patterns, and generates a full 7-slide carousel on-brand for my account. I approve the copy in 90 seconds. The images render. It ships to Instagram on autopilot at 2 PM.

Analyze my last 20 Instagram posts and tell me what is actually working. For each post, look at the format (reel, carousel, static image), the hook, the structure, and the CTA. Then tell me:

1. The top 3 hook patterns that got the most saves, shares, and comments
2. The 2 to 3 carousel structures that consistently outperform (like "problem to steps to payoff" or "list of 5 things")
3. The tone and voice patterns my best posts have in common

Give me this as a short report I can paste into a file called CAROUSEL-BRAND.md. Do not invent patterns. Only pull what is actually in my data.

Once your brand file is dialed in, everything else gets easy. The hard part is not the code. The hard part is getting specific enough about your carousel style that Claude knows exactly what to render. Vague in, vague out. The more specific you are, the more scroll-stopping the output.

Create a CAROUSEL-BRAND.md file in the root of this project. This is the file you will read fresh every single time I ask you to generate a carousel. Never cache it.

Walk me through it section by section. Ask me:
1. My active style. Pick one clear visual direction that matches my brand (handwritten notebook, terminal dark mode, minimal typographic, magazine editorial, etc.).
2. My exact color palette. Give me hex codes, not adjectives.
3. My typography direction. Fonts, weights, which font goes where.
4. The slide types I use (cover, problem, list, steps, before/after, CTA). For each one, write a short image prompt template with {{variables}} I can fill in per carousel.
5. Hard rules. The stuff to never do on a slide.

After my answers, save the full file as CAROUSEL-BRAND.md in the project root. Format it cleanly so I can edit it later without asking you.

Now the fun part. The file is in place, the slide templates are written, and Claude knows your style. Everything from here is one command.

I just finished [what you built today]. Read CAROUSEL-BRAND.md fresh (do not use a cached version) and pull my best-performing carousel structure based on my Instagram data. Draft a 7-slide carousel that teaches what I just shipped.

For each slide give me:
1. The slide type (cover, problem, list, steps, before/after, CTA)
2. The exact on-slide copy (headline, body, list items, whatever the slide type needs)
3. The image generation prompt filled with my brand's visual identity, palette, typography, and required elements from CAROUSEL-BRAND.md

Then generate the 7 slide images using Gemini 3 Pro Image Preview (nano banana) at 1080x1080. Save them to a local folder so I can review and post them.

A few things to know before you build this. Your brand file has to be read fresh every single run, never cached. If Claude caches it, your edits never show up. Tell Claude to reload it on every single carousel.

Nano banana (Gemini 3 Pro Image Preview) is miles ahead of every other image model for slides with real text on them right now. Do not try to use DALL-E or Stable Diffusion for this. The text accuracy just is not there yet.

The brand file is the whole ballgame. A vague brand file gives you AI-looking carousels. A hyper-specific brand file gives you carousels that look like a designer made them. Spend 30 minutes getting it right. It pays you back forever.

That is the whole thing. Analyze your best posts. Build a brand file. Write one slash command. Generate 7 slides on autopilot. Ship. I went from 30 minutes per carousel to 3 minutes of approval. And honestly, the output looks better than anything I was making by hand.

The full course walks through my exact CAROUSEL-BRAND.md, the full slash command I use, and how I wire it into my Instagram posting queue so carousels ship every day without me thinking about it.