---
title: "Emil Kowalski's Skills (open source)"
description: A pack of 12 design-engineering skills that teach AI coding agents the animation and interaction craft most models get wrong.
canonical: "https://10xgtm.ai/oss/emilkowalski-skills"
type: open-source-review
license: MIT
repo: "https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills"
language: Markdown
---

# Emil Kowalski's Skills

A pack of 12 design-engineering skills that teach AI coding agents the animation and interaction craft most models get wrong.

The sharpest **animation and motion** skill pack for AI coding agents, distilled from Emil Kowalski's work on Sonner, Vaul, and years at Vercel and Linear. Twelve focused skills teach agents the **right easing, duration, and interaction details** most models fumble. The catches: scope leans hard on motion and stops short of a full visual design system, it is one person's opinionated craft, and it is **written guidance the agent chooses to follow**, not enforced rules.

## Project facts

- **License:** MIT
- **Repo:** https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills
- **Stars:** 34988
- **Language:** Markdown

## What it does

- Installs into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and similar agents through the standard skills.sh installer, or drops in as a single reference file for a chat
- Ships 12 skills led by emil-design-eng, the main animation-and-design skill, plus animate for building a motion from scratch with the correct curve, duration, and properties
- Reviews and audits existing animations against Emil's rules and returns prioritized, self-contained plans any agent can execute (review-animations, improve-animations)
- Finds places in your UI that would genuinely benefit from motion and tells the agent what not to animate (find-animation-opportunities)
- Covers React Native and Expo motion specifically, with gestures, sheets, haptics, and keeping animation off the JS thread (animate-expo)
- Teaches Apple's interface and fluid-motion principles, modern Swift, UI-library selection, rapid prototyping with a version switcher, and setup for the Sonner toast library

## What it can't do

- Generate reference images or mockups; there are no image-creation skills here, unlike some rival design packs
- Act as a full visual design system; color, spacing, and layout advice is lighter than the animation and interaction depth
- Enforce its own rules mechanically; everything is written guidance the model chooses to follow, so quality tracks how well the agent obeys
- Cover marketing, SEO, or content work; the scope is design engineering for interfaces, nothing broader
- Build the app for you; the skills raise the craft bar, a person and the agent still write and ship the code
- Guarantee a smooth install through an official Claude Code plugin marketplace; the plugin and marketplace config PRs sit unmerged, so install is via the skills CLI

---
Full review: https://10xgtm.ai/oss/emilkowalski-skills