emilkowalski/skills

Why it's useful, from basith (Admin)

Skills for UI and motion work, including an Apple-style motion skill.

15 skills inside

• animate-expo

  Build animations in React Native and Expo, making the decisions in the order that determines whether they feel right — should it animate, which thread it runs on, which properties, spring or timing, how the gesture hands off, how it degrades. Writes the implementation with Reanim

• animate

  Build an animation from scratch, making the decisions in the order that determines whether it feels right — should it animate at all, what purpose, which tool, which properties, which curve and duration, how it interrupts, how it exits. Writes the implementation. Use when asked t

• animation-performance

  Keep web animations inside the frame budget — animate composite-only properties, keep motion off the main thread when the page is busy, and find the cause when an animation drops frames. Covers the layout/paint/composite pipeline, cheaper property swaps, CSS vs WAAPI vs requestAn

• animation-vocabulary

  Reverse-lookup glossary that turns a vague description of a web animation or motion effect into its exact term ("the bouncy thing when a popover opens" → Pop in; "the iOS rubber-band scroll" → Rubber-banding). Use when the user asks "what's it called when…", or describes a motion

• apple-design

  Apple's approach to interface design and fluid, physical motion, translated for the web. Use when building or reviewing gesture-driven UI, spring animations, drag/swipe/sheet interactions, momentum and interruptible transitions, translucent materials and depth, typography (optica

• ask-sonner

  Guide to Sonner, the React toast library — install and wire up the Toaster, pick the right toast() call, promise and loading toasts, updating, dismissing and persisting toasts, styling, theming and icons, positioning and multiple toasters. Use when working with Sonner or troubles

• break-ui

  Try to break a piece of UI by feeding it worst-case data — long names, unbreakable emails, one-letter names, missing fields, huge counts, zero items, long labels, non-Latin text, emoji, extreme numbers — then render it behind a "Demo data / Worst case" toggle and report everythin

• emil-design-eng

  This skill encodes Emil Kowalski's philosophy on UI polish, component design, animation decisions, and the invisible details that make software feel great.

• find-animation-opportunities

  Search a codebase or UI for places that don't animate but should, and reject everything that shouldn't. Read-only; it proposes motion with exact values, it does not implement it. Use when the user asks "what could be animated here?" or wants to "make this feel more alive". For fi

• improve-animations

  Survey a codebase's animation and motion code as a senior motion advisor, then produce a prioritized audit and self-contained implementation plans for other agents (or cheaper models) to execute. Read-only on source code — it plans improvements, it does not apply them. Use when t

• mobile-native

  Make a web app feel native on a phone — the small CSS and meta-tag fixes that separate "a website in a browser" from something that feels installed. Covers sticky hover states, tap highlight flashes, the 100vh bug, inputs that zoom the page, laggy taps, pull-to-refresh hijacking

• pick-ui-library

  Pick the right library for a given frontend task from a curated, opinionated list — numbers, OTP inputs, charts, command menus, virtualization, drag and drop, toasts, state, styling, and more. Only runs when explicitly invoked; it does not trigger on its own.

• prototype

  Build multiple genuinely different versions of a UI piece you describe, rendered behind a visual picker so you can flip through them live and promote the one that feels right. Only runs when explicitly invoked; it does not trigger on its own.

• review-animations

  Reviews animation and motion code against a high craft bar derived from Emil Kowalski's design engineering philosophy. Default to flagging; approval is earned.

• write-swift

  How to write modern Swift well — modeling with value types, Swift 6 data-race safety and approachable concurrency (@concurrent, main-actor-by-default, actors, task groups), protocols and generics (some vs any), API design, performance and ARC, Swift Testing, macros, and the moder

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