skills/README.md

Skills For Design Engineers

My agent skills that I use every day. For designers and engineers to help them build better user interfaces.

Knowing whether you made a right choice when it comes to animations, or design in general, is hard. These skills aim to help you get to those right decisions faster.

They are based on my years of experience working at companies like Vercel and Linear.

If you want to dive even deeper into design engineering, you can checkout my animation course:

Check out animations.dev

Quickstart (30-second setup)

1. Run the skills.sh installer:

npx skills@latest add emilkowalski/skill

2. Pick the skills you want, and which coding agents you want to install them on.

3. You’re ready to go.

Why these skills exists

Agents don’t have great taste

I have seen plenty of times that agents don’t pick the right ingredients for an animation. An ease-in easing for an enter animation when it’s supposed to be ease-out (here’s why). Or they choose a solid border instead of a semi-transparent shadow.

All these little things compound and make your interface either amazing, or just plain bad. Somewhere between year three and year ten in your design journey, something changes. You stop making a certain category of mistake. Not because you looked it up. Because you can feel it before it happens. That’s intuition.

These skills aim to give you that intuition. As explained in Agents with Taste, these skills list all the little mistakes agents can potentially make and explain how to fix them.

This is your shortcut to great interfaces. A shortcut to stand out in a sea of slop.

Reference

• emil-design-eng — The main skill that consinsts of mostly animation, but also some design advice.
• review-animations — Review your animations in a strict way, based on my rules.