Emil Kowalski 's skills repo just passed 50,000 stars and 2.7 million downloads. It's a set of agent skills for designers and engineers, mostly about motion: when to animate, reviewing animations, finding spots that could use one, keeping them fast. There's also Apple design, native mobile and prototyping in there.
There are some really neat skills in there that I use pretty often.
It also shows up in Sree's stack . His animate, ui-design, SwiftUI and UIKit skills all draw on Emil's.
Below, his 15 skills as a brain: what each one does, which skills point to which, and the libraries they teach. Click a dot to walk it. Under that, five everyday bits of UI built two ways. The ones on the right follow his skills. Try each pair.
Stars 50,000
Downloads 2.7M
Skills 15 Build motion Judge motion Design Pick and ship animate animate-expo animation-performance review-animations improve-animations find-animation-opportunities animation-vocabulary emil-design-eng apple-design mobile-native break-ui prototype pick-ui-library ask-sonner write-swift Sonner Vaul Base UI Reanimated Framer Motion WAAPI
Build motion
animate · Builds an animation in the order that decides if it feels right: should it move at all, why, which curve, how it exits.animate-expo · The same, for React Native and Expo: which thread it runs on, springs, and gesture hand-offs.animation-performance · Keeps animations inside the frame budget, and finds out why one drops frames.Judge motion
review-animations · Reviews motion code against his bar. Flags by default; approval is earned.improve-animations · Audits a codebase's motion and writes plans other agents can carry out.find-animation-opportunities · Finds places that should animate, and rejects the ones that shouldn't.animation-vocabulary · Turns "the bouncy thing when a popover opens" into the right term.Design
emil-design-eng · His philosophy on UI polish, component design and the details that make software feel great.apple-design · Apple's fluid, physical motion and materials, translated for the web.mobile-native · The small CSS and meta fixes that make a web app feel installed on a phone.break-ui · Feeds a UI worst-case data, like long names, emoji and huge numbers, to see what breaks.prototype · Builds several genuinely different versions of a UI to flip between live.Pick and ship
pick-ui-library · Picks a library for the job from his opinionated list.ask-sonner · A guide to Sonner, his React toast library.write-swift · How to write modern Swift: value types, concurrency, API design, testing.Sonner · A library or API the skills teach.Vaul · A library or API the skills teach.Base UI · A library or API the skills teach.Reanimated · A library or API the skills teach.Framer Motion · A library or API the skills teach.WAAPI · A library or API the skills teach.Open both menus.
Typical Options Rename Duplicate Delete
Starts from nothing. Grows out of its own middle. Slow at the start. Emil's way Options Rename Duplicate Delete
Starts almost full size, not from nothing. Grows out of the button that opened it. Fast at the start, so it feels instant. Press and hold both buttons.
Typical Save changes
Nothing happens until you let go. Emil's way Save changes
Gives a little the moment you press, so you know it heard you. Move across the icons, or tap them.
Typical Every tooltip makes you wait, every time. Emil's way The first one waits, so they don't pop up by accident. Once one is open, the next ones show instantly. Tap Save a few times, quickly.
Typical Save Saved Your changes are live.
Drops from the top. Every tap restarts it, so it jumps. Emil's way Save Saved Your changes are live.
Rises from the bottom and leaves the way it came. Another tap doesn't restart it. It just stays. Open and close both a few times.
Typical Search⌘K Search notes…
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Animates every single time. Emil's way Search⌘K Search notes…
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No animation at all. You open it all day, so motion would only slow you down.