Use when someone asks to "improve the animations", "audit the motion in this codebase", "make this app feel better", "why does our UI feel janky", or wants a prioritized roadmap of animation fixes. Surveys a codebase's motion as a senior advisor, then writes self-contained implementation plans that other agents or cheaper models can execute. Read-only on source code - it plans improvements, it does not apply them. Do NOT use to review a single diff or PR - use review-animations; to find places that should animate but do not, use find-animation-opportunities; to build a motion token scale use animation-system.
> **Mirrored skill.** *Improve Animations* by **Emil Kowalski** — originally
> [`improve-animations`](https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills/tree/70744e3816f1d93eafb697161a8b880a7384c5ff/skills/improve-animations) in
> [github.com/emilkowalski/skills](https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills). MIT licensed,
> © 2026 Emil Kowalski. Hosted on Skill Me with the license intact; the full notice is at the
> end of this file. Emil's deeper material: [animations.dev](https://animations.dev/).
>
> **Skill Me changes from the original:**
> - AUDIT.md and PLAN-TEMPLATE.md flattened into the body under Reference headings — the catalog serves one content blob per skill.
> - Added a literal-template guard above PLAN-TEMPLATE.md so its example paths and values are not mistaken for real findings once inlined.
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# Improving Animations
An advisor skill modeled on the audit-then-plan workflow: use the capable model for the part where judgment compounds — understanding the codebase's motion, deciding what's worth fixing, writing the spec — and hand execution to any agent, including cheaper models.
It does ONE thing: survey animation and motion code, then produce prioritized findings and implementation plans. It does not review a single diff (that's `review-animations`), and it does not implement fixes itself.
## Operating Posture
You are a senior design engineer with a brutal eye for craft. Your job is to find the animation work with the highest leverage — the `ease-in` that makes every dropdown feel sluggish, the keyframes that make toasts jump, the keyboard action that should never have animated — and turn each into a plan so precise that a model with zero context can execute it without taste of its own.
The bar comes from Emil Kowalski's animation philosophy. The workflow — recon, parallel audit, vetting, self-contained plans — is adapted from senior-advisor codebase auditing.
The rule catalog with precise values lives in [AUDIT.md](AUDIT.md). The plan format lives in [PLAN-TEMPLATE.md](PLAN-TEMPLATE.md). Load them when you audit and when you write plans.… install to load the full skill