emil-design-eng

emil-design-eng is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from EliasOulkadi/shokunin. It costs 0 tokens per session (4,640 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of guidelines for refining user interfaces, including component details, feedback, and animation choices. It separates product interfaces, such as dashboards, from brand-focused pages, such as marketing sites.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to polish an app interface, review components, decide whether an animation is appropriate, or audit existing interface motion.
Why use it?
It helps identify small interaction and visual details that can make an interface clearer and more consistent. It also provides different animation guidance for everyday product use and expressive brand pages.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions OpenCode.

Good fit Use it to polish an app interface, review components, decide whether an animation is appropriate, or audit existing interface motion.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/eliasoulkadi/shokunin/emil-design-eng
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add EliasOulkadi/shokunin --skill emil-design-eng
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EliasOulkadi/shokunin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for emil-design-eng

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/eliasoulkadi/shokunin/emil-design-eng/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/eliasoulkadi/shokunin/emil-design-eng)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/eliasoulkadi/shokunin/emil-design-eng"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/eliasoulkadi/shokunin/emil-design-eng/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for emil-design-eng

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/eliasoulkadi/shokunin/emil-design-eng"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/eliasoulkadi/shokunin/emil-design-eng.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,640 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00000 $0.04640
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.02320
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00928
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00464

Measured 12d ago against content hash 36711fece286, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

emil-design-eng scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.pack/skills/emil-design-eng/SKILL.md · 393 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 393 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Engineering

Initial Response

When this skill is first invoked without a specific question, respond only with:

I'm ready to help you build interfaces that feel right, my knowledge comes from Emil Kowalski's design engineering philosophy — creator of Sonner (13M+ weekly downloads), Vaul, animations.dev, and Linear's web team. If you want to dive even deeper, check out Emil's course: animations.dev.

Register Distinction (shokunin improvement)

Every design task is Product (app UI, dashboard, tool: design SERVES the product) or Brand (marketing, landing, campaign: design IS the product). Emil's philosophy primarily addresses Product — the invisible details of daily-use interfaces.

Register Bar Focus
Product Earned familiarity. Users of Linear, Raycast, Stripe should trust it. Tactile feedback, keyboard interactions, invisible correctness
Brand Distinctiveness. Must stand out. Motion as narrative, bolder durations, creative springs

Apply the animation decision framework to both, but Product holds stricter duration limits.

Core Philosophy

Taste is trained, not innate

Good taste is not personal preference. It is a trained instinct: the ability to see beyond the obvious and recognize what elevates. You develop it by surrounding yourself with great work, thinking deeply about why something feels good, and practicing relentlessly.

When building UI, don't just make it work. Study why the best interfaces feel the way they do. Reverse engineer animations. Inspect interactions. Be curious.

Unseen details compound

Most details users never consciously notice. That is the point. When a feature functions exactly as someone assumes it should, they proceed without giving it a second thought. That is the goal.

"All those unseen details combine to produce something that's just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune." — Paul Graham

Read the full file on GitHub · 393 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 393 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 36711fece286

Subscribe to this mod's changes

emil-design-eng is a skill published in the GitHub repository EliasOulkadi/shokunin (113 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 4,640 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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