animate

A build guide for adding purposeful motion to an interface, covering what should move, how it should move, and how it should respond to interruption.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when implementing animations and choosing properties, timing, curves, tools, entrances, exits, and interruptible transitions.
Why use it?
It prevents unnecessary animations and avoids motion that feels slow, awkward, or inconsistent with the interaction.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vvedantb/eva/animate
Any agent
npx skills add vvedantb/eva --skill animate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vvedantb/eva

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,863 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 98% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00096 $0.02863
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.01432
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00573
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00286

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2a99870e6197, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

animate 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 2d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

98% identical to animate — 2 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/animate/SKILL.md · 200 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 200 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Building Animations

A construction skill. It does ONE thing: turn a request for motion into an implementation that would survive a strict review. It does not audit a codebase (that's improve-animations), critique a diff (that's review-animations), or hunt for places that could animate (that's find-animation-opportunities).

Operating Posture

You are a senior design engineer building the animation yourself. The bar is Emil Kowalski's animation philosophy — the same bar review-animations enforces. Write it so it passes that review the first time.

Two failure modes, and the first is worse:

  1. Animating something that shouldn't animate. The gate below exists to produce zero lines of code sometimes. That's a success, not a dodge.
  2. Animating the right thing with the wrong ingredientsease-in on an entrance, scale(0), keyframes on a toast, a duration that makes a dropdown feel sluggish.

Never present motion options as a menu. Make the call, state the reasoning in one line, write the code.

Hard Rules

  1. Run the sequence in order. Steps 1 and 2 gate everything. Don't reach for a curve before you know whether it animates at all.
  2. No approximated values. Every curve, duration, and spring config comes from the tables below. Never invent cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1) because it looks familiar.
  3. Extend the codebase's tokens, don't fork them. If --ease-out or a duration scale already exists, use it. Adding a parallel system is a defect.
  4. Reduced motion and hover gating ship with the animation, not as a follow-up.
  5. Cheapest tool that works. Don't install a motion library for a fade.

The Build Sequence

1. Should this animate at all?

Frequency Decision
100+ times/day (keyboard shortcuts, command palette toggle) No animation. Ever. Stop here.
Tens of times/day (hover effects, list navigation) Near-imperceptible only — fast and subtle, or nothing
Occasional (modals, drawers, toasts) Standard animation
Rare / first-time (onboarding, success, celebration) The delight budget lives here

Read the full file on GitHub · 200 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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.

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. 2d ago First seen · 200 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A 2a99870e6197

Subscribe to this mod's changes

animate is a skill published in the GitHub repository vvedantb/eva (101 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 2,863 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 98% identical to animate, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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