Emil Kowalski Skills — Setup Guide¶
Source: skills.sh (694.4K combined installs) GitHub: emilkowalski/skills Category: Design Engineering First Seen: August 13, 2026 sweep Quality Tier: 🟢 Production
Emil Kowalski is the creator of Sonner (the toast library) and vaul, and one of the most-copied voices in agent UI quality. His skill pack is the highest-signal design-quality layer on skills.sh: it teaches agents to recognize bad AI-generated UI, audit motion instead of sprinkling it, and pick the right library before writing a component. emil-design-eng is the flagship at 204.4K installs.
Installation¶
npx skills add emilkowalski/skills
Installs all 10 skills. Hermes: place the SKILL.md files under your agent's skills directory, or run inside any skills.sh-compatible agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Hermes, OpenClaw, Nous Research).
Core Skills¶
| Skill | Installs | Use For |
|---|---|---|
| emil-design-eng | 204.4K | Fluid, tactile interface design — the core design-engineering doctrine |
| review-animations | 97.6K | Adversarial review of animation/motion code against craft bars |
| animation-vocabulary | 85.1K | Reverse-lookup glossary: vague descriptions → named motion primitives |
| apple-design | 77.0K | Apple's HIG-informed approach to fluid, physical interfaces |
| improve-animations | 70.1K | Senior-engineer pass over a codebase's animation and motion code |
| find-animation-opportunities | 58.7K | Scan a UI for places that should animate but don't |
| pick-ui-library | 44.8K | Choose the right frontend library for the task before building |
| prototype | 34.0K | Build multiple genuinely different UI versions of a piece |
| animate | 16.8K | Build an animation from scratch, making the decisions |
| ask-sonner | 5.9K | Sonner-specific component guidance |
Prerequisites¶
- A frontend project (React-based for most skills; ask-sonner requires Sonner)
- Access to motion libraries (Framer Motion / Motion One) for animation skills
CorpusIQ Use Cases¶
- UI quality gate for agent-built dashboards — run
review-animations+improve-animationsbefore shipping any agent-generated frontend, the same wayanti-ui-slopgates visual design - Docs site polish —
find-animation-opportunitieson docs.corpusiq.io surfaces motion gaps in landing and onboarding flows - Design-vocabulary alignment —
animation-vocabularygives team prompts shared language when briefing video/graphics work (pairs with the HyperFrames pipeline)
Limitations / Verification¶
- Quality-tier judgement is subjective — the skills encode opinions, not measurements; treat verdicts as review feedback, not tests
- Verify installation with
ls ~/.claude/skills/ | grep -i emilor your agent's equivalent skills directory listing