Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mthines/agent-skillsnpx agentmods add skills/mthines/agent-skills/animationsWrote 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/mthines/agent-skills/animations)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mthines/agent-skills/animations"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mthines/agent-skills/animations/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/mthines/agent-skills/animations"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mthines/agent-skills/animations.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 | $0.05037 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00024 | $0.02015 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00012 | $0.01007 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00504 |
Grade A, and why
animations 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 yesterday.
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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 309 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Animations
Produces or reviews web animations that hit 60 fps (or 120 fps on high-refresh displays), respect user motion preferences, and use the cheapest tool for the job — CSS first, the Web Animations API for runtime control, Motion when you need spring physics, gestures, or shared-layout animations, React Three Fiber when the rendering model itself needs to be three-dimensional.
This
SKILL.mdis a thin index. Detailed rules live inrules/*.mdand load on demand. Worked recipes live inreferences/recipes.md. Drop-in HTML/CSS snippets live intemplates/.
Web only. This skill's mechanics are web (CSS, Motion, View Transitions, Web Animations API). For React Native / Expo motion (Reanimated, gesture-handler, Moti, Lottie, Rive), use the
animations-nativeskill instead — it reuses this skill's platform-agnostic brainstorm / verb→motion catalog.
Core Bet
Animate transform, opacity, and filter only. Those are the
three properties the browser composites on the GPU without triggering
layout or paint on the main thread. Anything else (width, height,
top, left, margin, padding, box-shadow, …) goes through
layout or paint and will jank. Full table in
rules/safe-properties.md.
For properties that seem unanimatable — height: auto, display: none, list reorders, route changes — modern CSS has native primitives
that re-express them as GPU work. See
rules/modern-css.md.
Brainstorm Mode — interaction → feedback
Use this entry point when the user asks what the animation should be, not how to build it. Examples that route here, not to the technical decision flow below:
- "What's the ideal feedback when I press this button?"
- "How should closing a card feel?"
- "What's the natural animation when this toggles?"
- "What should happen when a user deletes a row?"
What ships with it
22 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
- lens.md 4.2 KB
- references/recipes.md 8.8 KB
- rules/accessibility.md 6.6 KB
- rules/advanced-effects.md 11 KB
- rules/debugging.md 7.4 KB
- rules/diagnostic-surface.md 25 KB
- rules/external-engines.md 9.6 KB
- rules/interaction-feedback.md 27 KB
- rules/interactive-effects.md 6.1 KB
- rules/modern-css.md 8.1 KB
- rules/patterns.md 6.3 KB
- rules/perceived-performance.md 29 KB
- rules/react-state.md 12 KB
- rules/record-and-iterate.md 9.9 KB
- rules/safe-properties.md 8.1 KB
- rules/state-choreography.md 16 KB
- rules/three-d.md 8.5 KB
- rules/timing-easing.md 6.3 KB
- rules/when-to-use-js.md 10 KB
- templates/cursor-spotlight.html 1.3 KB
- templates/scroll-fade.html 2.2 KB
- templates/stagger-list.html 1.3 KB
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.
- yesterday Changed 72d392fe8e43
- 3d ago Changed · -12 lines · -152 tokens per session 81097950dbab
- 24d ago Changed dbd6c828f5ae
- 1mo ago First seen · 321 lines · 213 tokens per session scan A 4c39b51ba50f
animations is a skill published in the GitHub repository mthines/agent-skills (20 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 61 tokens to every session and 5,037 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 2026-08-31.
Other skills, from other repositories
frontend-ui-engineering
Build production-quality, accessible, non-generic-looking UI components and pages — component composition, the state-management ladder (local to global), avoiding the recognizable "AI aesthetic," WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, and responsive/loading/empty states. Use when building or modifying user-facing interfaces, or…
ai-design-slop-audit
This skill should be used when the user wants an evidence-backed review of an existing UI for generic "AI-generated" design defaults — asking to "audit this design", "why does this look AI-generated", "review this for design slop", or wants a removal-first cleanup plan without a speculative redesign. Point-in-time…
animation-improvement-planning
This skill should be used when the user asks to "improve the animations", "audit the motion across the app", "make this feel better" without a specific diff to review, or wants a prioritized roadmap of animation fixes rather than a single verdict. Surveys a codebase's motion, produces a severity-ranked findings table…
animation-opportunity-scan
This skill should be used when the user asks "what could be animated here?", "where should we add motion?", or wants the interface to "feel more alive" without saying what to change. Read-only sweep of a codebase or UI for moments that would genuinely benefit from motion, gated by frequency/purpose/duration/function…
playground
Creates interactive HTML playgrounds — self-contained single-file explorers that let users configure something visually through controls, see a live preview, and copy out a prompt. Use when the user asks to make a playground, explorer, or interactive tool for a topic.
frontend-ui-engineering
Builds production-quality, accessible, responsive user-facing UIs. Use when building or modifying interfaces and pages, creating components, implementing layouts, meeting WCAG accessibility requirements, managing state, or when the output needs to look and feel production-quality rather than AI-generated.