emilkowalski/skills

What It Is

A collection of agent skills for designers and engineers working on user interfaces. The skills encode practical rules about animation, motion, and interaction design so that a coding agent can make better choices instead of defaulting to generic or awkward UI behavior. Examples include using ease-out rather than ease-in for an enter animation, or choosing a semi-transparent shadow over a solid border.

The repository is a set of Markdown skill definitions, not an application or component library. It is aimed at people using AI coding agents to build interfaces, especially with React, React Native/Expo, and Swift. Individual skills cover building animations from scratch, reviewing and improving existing motion, finding or removing animation opportunities, coordinating multi-element motion, diagnosing dropped frames, selecting UI libraries, prototyping variants, native-feeling mobile web behavior, worst-case UI testing, and working with the Sonner toast library. The rules are presented as distilled from the author's experience at companies such as Vercel and Linear.

Install and Use

The documented installation flow uses the skills CLI and expects a Node.js environment with npx available:

npx skills@latest add emilkowalski/skills

After installation, the skills become available to the agent environment configured by that CLI. The project does not document a separate runtime setup, a configuration file, or a manual copy-based installation in the README.

To use a specific skill, reference its file in the repository or invoke its name through the agent tooling. For example, animate builds an animation and chooses curves, durations, and properties; review-animations applies a strict review pass; and improve-animations audits a codebase and returns prioritized plans. The full list is in the README reference section.

Constraints

• The skills are written as guidance for AI agents, so their output quality depends on the agent and model that loads them; they are not a deterministic linter or test suite.
• Several skills target specific stacks: animate-expo targets React Native and Expo, write-swift targets modern Swift, and ask-sonner covers the author's Sonner toast library. Other skills, such as mobile-native and break-ui, are oriented toward web UI behavior.
• Installation requires the external skills CLI and network access to fetch the repository through it. The README does not specify supported versions of Node.js or the CLI.
• The repository is MIT-licensed. The skills describe design opinions and conventions rather than hard compatibility guarantees for every UI framework.

HotRepo's take

The project has no recorded GitHub daily rank, snapshot history, or Hacker News discussion in the available HotRepo data, so there is no trend or rank observation to make from the site record. The concrete thing to assess is the content itself: it packages opinionated motion and interaction rules into files that an agent can load, with separate skills for reviewing, improving, and removing animations. That structure makes it more useful as a repeatable review layer than as a one-off prompt collection. The explicit stack-specific skills also set expectations: it is not a general design system, and its advice should be read as authored guidance rather than universally validated rules.