emilkowalski/skills is a collection of guidance for coding agents that helps them make better interface and animation decisions. Designers and engineers use the skills to choose more appropriate motion, styling, and interaction details when building user interfaces. The catalogue entries are examples of the project's agent skills.
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.
npx skills add emilkowalski/skills --skill pick-ui-librarygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/emilkowalski/skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/emilkowalski/skills/pick-ui-library)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/emilkowalski/skills/pick-ui-library"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/emilkowalski/skills/pick-ui-library/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/emilkowalski/skills/pick-ui-library"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/emilkowalski/skills/pick-ui-library.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk pass
- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00061 | $0.01177 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00024 | $0.00471 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00235 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00118 |
Grade A, and why
pick-ui-library 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 1mo 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.
Copies of this mod
8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- pick-ui-library — 100% identical, 8 lines differ
- pick-ui-library — 100% identical, 8 lines differ
- pick-ui-library — 100% identical, 8 lines differ
- pick-ui-library — 100% identical, 8 lines differ
- pick-ui-library — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- pick-ui-library — 100% identical, 8 lines differ
- pick-ui-library — 100% identical, 8 lines differ
- pick-ui-library — 100% identical, 8 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 86 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Picking The Right Library
Initial Response
When this skill is first invoked without a specific question, respond only with:
I'm ready to pick the right library for your task, my picks come from Emil Kowalski's curated list.
Do not provide any other information until the user asks a question.
A lookup skill. When invoked with a task ("I need toasts", "what should I use for drag and drop?"), match the task to the curated list below and recommend the library. These are deliberate, taste-driven picks — don't substitute alternatives outside this list unless the user asks for one or the task genuinely isn't covered.
How to use this
- Identify the task, not the library the user named. "I need to show a dropdown" is a UI-primitives task (base-ui), even if they asked about something else.
- Check what's already installed. Look at
package.jsonfirst. If the project already uses a listed library, use it. If it uses a competitor (e.g. react-window instead of Virtuoso), flag the recommendation but don't churn the dependency without being asked. - Recommend one library, state what it's for in one sentence, and install/wire it up if that's part of the request. Don't present a menu of options when the list has a clear answer.
- If the task isn't covered by the list, say so explicitly and recommend from your own knowledge — but be clear you've left the curated list.
The list
UI components & primitives
| Task | Library |
|---|---|
| Unstyled, accessible UI components (dialogs, popovers, menus, selects…) | base-ui |
| Command menus (⌘K palettes) | cmdk |
| Toasts / notifications | Sonner |
| One-time password / verification code inputs | input-otp |
| Customizable GUIs / control panels | Leva — dialkit is an alternative |
Motion & visuals
| Task | Library |
|---|---|
| General-purpose animation (springs, layout animations, enter/exit) | motion (Framer Motion) |
| Animating numbers (counters, prices, stats) | NumberFlow |
| Animated text components | torph |
| 3D globes | Cobe |
| Dynamic OG images (HTML/CSS → SVG/PNG) | Satori |
| Syntax highlighting | shiki |
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.
- 1mo ago Changed · +8 lines 675fdce30868
- 1mo ago First seen · 78 lines · 61 tokens per session scan A 4b889bd6c083
pick-ui-library is a skill published in the GitHub repository emilkowalski/skills (49,391 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 61 tokens to every session and 1,177 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
webgl-holographic-foil
A self-contained WebGL2 hero: thin-film interference over a crushed-foil surface whose palette shifts with the viewing angle; move the cursor to tilt the film.
html-ppt-hermes-cyber-terminal
OpenDesign + BYOK: choosing and wiring your own model, hands-on — cost, quality, and the routing decision. Built as a decision-grade AI literacy deck for engineers, IT, applied-AI teams.
html-ppt-taste-brutalist
16:9 HTML deck in tactical-telemetry / CRT-terminal taste. Deactivated-CRT charcoal slides, white-phosphor monospace, hazard-red accent, scanline overlay, ASCII syntax, density over decoration. Distilled from Leonxlnx/taste-skill brutalist-skill (Tactical Telemetry mode).
visual-ralph
Visual Ralph orchestration for frontend UI from generated references, static references, or live URL targets, using $ultragoal with built-in visual verdict and pixel-diff evidence until the implementation matches and leaves a reproducible design system.
glance-canonical-layouts
Use this skill to create home screen widgets using Jetpack Glance Canonical Layouts from the Android Platform Samples project, or when asked to implement standard widget layout patterns (including Check List, Image Grid, Snap Scrolling, and Standard Toolbar).
accessibility
Consolidated accessibility skill entrypoint for WCAG 2.2, ARIA Authoring Practices, cognitive accessibility, Section 508, EN 301 549, design intent verification, and the Accessibility Planner workflow.