Benji TaylorPushing Claude Code’s animation abilities to build a universal icon primitive.
Summary
Benji wanted icons that transform into one another rather than crossfade, the way a hamburger rotates into a close button. His first ask produced exactly what you would expect, an AnimatePresence wrapper fading one SVG out and another in. The fix was a constraint rather than a better prompt. Every icon has to be exactly three SVG lines, with unused lines collapsed to invisible points, which means any icon shares a structure with every other and can morph into it. Twenty-one icons came out of a single session, and some of them took real creativity to fit the rule.
View full writingGoes well with
emil-design-eng
The design-engineering house style behind Sonner and Vaul.
Emil's main skill. Mostly animation, with the UI-polish and component judgement that surrounds it: what to build, how far to push it, and when to stop.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills
animate
Builds an animation from scratch, decisions in the order that matters.
Should it animate at all, what purpose, which tool, which properties, which curve and duration, how it interrupts, how it exits. Then writes the implementation.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill animate
review-animations
Reviews your motion strictly, against Emil's rules.
A production-critical pass over animation quality, timing and consistency in a diff. Pairs with improve-animations, which does the same for a whole codebase.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill review-animations
Emil Kowalski