Agent skills and plugins

emilkowalski/

skills

Installable skill packs that teach coding agents animation and UI design taste, drawn from the author's experience at Vercel and Linear.

What’s new here

Agents pick the wrong easing curve, reach for a solid border when a semi-transparent shadow is correct, and let motion run on the JS thread. The author collected these specific failure modes from years at Vercel and Linear and encoded them as discrete, installable skills. The focus is animation and motion taste, not general engineering practice.

What it does

The repo ships a set of Markdown skill files, installable via npx skills@latest add emilkowalski/skills. The skills cover:

  • emil-design-eng: General animation and design advice
  • animate / animate-expo: Build an animation from scratch with correct curve, duration, and properties, for web and React Native/Expo respectively
  • review-animations / improve-animations: Audit existing animations against defined rules and produce prioritized fix plans
  • animation-performance: Diagnose dropped frames, off-main-thread motion, and common janky patterns
  • find-animation-opportunities: Identify where motion would help (and where it would not)
  • animation-vocabulary: Get better animations from an AI by using the right words
  • apple-design: Apple’s WWDC interface principles translated for the web
  • mobile-native: Fixes for sticky hover states, the 100vh bug, zoom-on-input, laggy taps, and safe areas
  • break-ui: Stress-test a UI with worst-case data: long names, empty lists, huge counts
  • pick-ui-library: Steer agents toward libraries the author trusts rather than hand-rolled or abandoned packages
  • ask-sonner: Setup, styling, and common fixes for the Sonner toast library
  • write-swift: Modern Swift including Swift 6 concurrency and Swift Testing
  • prototype: Build and compare multiple UI variants via a switcher

Who it’s for

Frontend engineers and designers who use AI coding agents and find the output technically correct but visually mediocre. Useful if you work with animation-heavy UIs, want to stop correcting the same easing mistakes repeatedly, or are building for mobile web and tired of browser quirks slipping through.

Try it

Run this command in your project root to add the skills:

npx skills@latest add emilkowalski/skills

How mature is it

45,178 stars and 2,564 forks since its March 2026 creation. 21 commits in the last 90 days, 3 contributors, 4 open issues, no open pull requests. No formal releases; skills are distributed via the npx CLI. Licensed MIT.

Where it sits

Part of Agent skills and plugins. How it connects to repos already reviewed:

  • Alternative toOwl-Listener/designer-skillsBoth deliver design-domain skills to coding agents, but this repo centers on animation correctness and motion taste rather than the broader design-system and research workflow coverage in designer-skills.
  • Alternative tocodeswithroh/tastemakerTastemaker grounds UI taste in reference images and a persistent profile, while this repo encodes taste as discrete, installable skill files.
  • Related tomattpocock/skillsBoth repos publish installable agent skills for engineers, targeting different domain expertise.