# Delight

> Use when deciding whether a moment earns extra craft: the delight-impact curve, easter eggs, celebration, sound and haptics, and deliberate friction. Decides whether, not how.

- Skill: `agentsorg/delight` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 2 files)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add agentsorg/delight`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/agentsorg/delight/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: agentsorg (https://skillmd.com/u/agentsorg)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/agentsorg/delight

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# Earning a Moment

Delight is a budget, not a style, and the default answer is no. This skill exists to reject nine ideas so the tenth is worth building — a product with one earned moment and uniform polish everywhere else beats a product with six flourishes and a broken focus ring. **Boundary with `motion`:** this skill decides *whether* a moment gets extra craft; `motion` decides *how* it moves. Nothing here contains a duration, an easing curve, or a transform — the instant the answer is yes, hand the moment to `motion` (one element), `transitions` (a sequence), or `gestures` (pointer-driven) and stop. If someone is asking which curve their confetti uses, they have already skipped the decision this skill makes.

**Read the product's existing personality before proposing anything.** Count what is already there: a sound file, a `navigator.vibrate` call, a confetti dependency (`canvas-confetti`, `react-rewards`), a celebration component, a mute preference, a `prefers-reduced-motion` block. A product with zero flourishes has a deliberate register that one addition changes; a product with four has a consistency problem, and the right proposal is usually to remove three. Whatever survives uses the project's existing motion, sound, and token systems — a delight moment is the worst possible reason to introduce a second animation library.

## Quick Reference

| Topic | Where |
| --- | --- |
| Once the frequency tier is fixed and you need the concrete moments that have historically earned their place at that tier — plus the ones that never do | [moments.md](references/moments.md) |

## The Delight-Impact Curve

Benji Taylor's formulation: **"the potential for delight increases as the frequency of feature usage decreases."** Rauno Freiberg is credited in Taylor's own `/family-values` footnotes as a co-source on the frequency-and-novelty axis. Emil Kowalski's frequency gate gives the same curve as four operating rows, and this is the decision procedure — score the moment before discussing it:

| How often the user sees it | Verdict |
| --- | --- |
| `100+ / day` (command palette, keyboard nav, tab switch) | No flourish. Ever. No animation either. |
| `tens / day` (hover, list navigation, save) | Strip whatever is there. |
| Occasional (modal, drawer, toast) | Standard treatment only — correctness, not character. |
| Rare / first-time / celebration | Delight is *available*. It is still not automatic. |

Score by the frequency of the **outcome**, not the action. The four-hundredth message send of the day is top row; the send that completes a year-long streak is bottom row, even though the button is identical. This is the only legitimate way a high-frequency control ends up with a moment attached to it.

## Core Principles

1. **Uniform polish is a precondition, not a companion.** Taylor's dirty-bathroom rule, credited in his own margin note to Paco Coursey: *"our ability to introduce delight anywhere depends on achieving a consistent level of polish everywhere."* A celebration in a product with a missing `:focus-visible` ring reads as a distraction from the mess. Concrete gate: if any interactive element in the same view lacks a hover, focus, active, disabled, or loading state, the budget goes there first and the moment is deferred. *Exception:* a throwaway demo or pitch prototype whose entire purpose is the one moment being demonstrated.

2. **One delight moment per flow.** *"Mastering delight is mastering selective emphasis"* — Taylor. Two celebrations in one flow do not double the feeling; they cancel, because emphasis is defined by what surrounds it. Count moments per flow, not per screen: `1`. *Exception:* a genuinely multi-day flow (a course, an onboarding that spans weeks) may carry one per session, provided the sessions are far enough apart that nobody sees two in a row.

3. **State the payload, or reject.** Every proposal fills three fields in one sentence each — `Frequency`, `Payload`, `If removed` — in the block at the end of this file. If `If removed` answers "nothing", remove it; that is not a bar to clear, it is the default outcome. Reject in writing rather than silently, so the idea does not return next quarter. *Exception:* none — an unfilled field is itself a rejection.

4. **Sound is composed to the interaction, not attached to it.** On Honk, Taylor credits Ethan Mueller with composing the sound to match the interaction's timing — a stock library sample fired on an arbitrary event is noise wearing a costume. Hard constraints regardless: never play audio before a user gesture (browsers block it and users hate it), ship a mute control honored on first paint, and default the web to `muted`. *Exception:* a product whose output *is* audio, where sound is the content and not the garnish.

5. **A haptic marks a transition, and in a shared moment it fires for everyone.** Taylor's Honk example is a simultaneous haptic felt by both users at once — that simultaneity is the entire social payload, not the buzz. Platform truth on the web: `navigator.vibrate` is Android-only and iOS Safari has no haptic API at all, so never design a moment whose only payload is a haptic. *Exception:* native and React Native shells, where `Haptics.impactAsync`-class APIs are real on both platforms and a haptic can carry the moment alone.

6. **Deliberate friction is a delight instrument when it changes behavior.** Taylor reports that having people sign their name on screen *"noticeably reduced bad behaviour in random chats"* — the friction *is* the moment. Justify it by naming the behavior it suppresses; if you cannot name one, you have added a step. *Exception, absolute:* never add friction to a recovery path — `undo`, `cancel`, `sign-out`, `close`, `delete-my-account` stay frictionless no matter how much friction the forward path carries.

7. **An easter egg must be unreachable by accident and free to miss.** It sits on the path to `0` tasks, changes `0` state, and is the only route to `0` features — a "hidden" feature that users need is a discoverability bug. *Exception:* none — anything failing one of the three is a feature, and gets designed as one.

8. **Under `prefers-reduced-motion: reduce`, celebration is the category that drops to zero movement.** Elsewhere reduced motion means gentler, not absent; confetti, screen shake, and physics bursts are the exception — keep the words and the color, remove the travel entirely. *Exception:* none. Motion sickness is not a taste question.

9. **Take having fun seriously.** Taylor's phrase, and it is an engineering instruction: a moment ships with a spec, a review, and a `prefers-reduced-motion` path, or it does not ship. A half-built flourish is worse than none, because it reads as the level of care the whole product received. The aggregate is the mechanism — Paul Graham, quoted by Emil Kowalski: *"a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune."* Most of that singing is invisible correctness; the audible note only works because of it. *Exception:* none — an unfinished moment is cut, not shipped rough.

## Smell / Fix

| Smell | Fix |
| --- | --- |
| Confetti on a daily action | Score the outcome's frequency; if it is not the bottom row, cut it |
| Two celebrations in one flow | Keep the one nearest the real outcome, delete the other |
| A flourish proposed while focus rings are missing | Fix the states first; the moment is deferred, not rejected |
| Stock sound effect on a generic event | Compose to the interaction or ship silent |
| Sound with no mute, or audio before a user gesture | Mute honored on first paint; default `muted` on web |
| A moment whose only payload is a haptic | Redesign for the visual channel; iOS Safari has no haptic API |
| Friction added to a cancel or undo path | Remove it — recovery paths are exempt, without exception |
| An easter egg that is the only route to a feature | Promote it to a real feature and design it as one |
| Celebration with no `prefers-reduced-motion` path | Words and color only; remove all travel |
| "It would be cool if…" with no named payload | Apply Principle 3; reject in writing |

## Output format

A delight proposal is one block, and a rejection uses the same block so both are comparable:

```
Moment:     <what happens, in one sentence>
Frequency:  <100+/day | tens/day | occasional | rare-first-celebration>  ← scored on the OUTCOME
Payload:    <the feeling being bought>
If removed: <what specifically gets worse>
Precondition: <state-coverage check in this view: pass | fail>
Verdict:    Earned → hand to `motion` / `transitions` / `gestures`  |  Rejected → reason
```

## Checklist

- [ ] Frequency scored on the outcome, not the action, and written down
- [ ] Top two rows of the curve produce a rejection, always
- [ ] State coverage in the same view verified before any moment is approved
- [ ] Exactly one delight moment in this flow
- [ ] Payload and removal cost named in one sentence each
- [ ] Sound composed, muted by default, mute honored on first paint
- [ ] No moment depends on a haptic alone
- [ ] Friction justified by a named behavior, and absent from every recovery path
- [ ] Easter eggs off-path, stateless, and non-essential
- [ ] Reduced-motion path removes travel from celebration entirely
- [ ] Verdict recorded; timing and curves handed to `motion`, never decided here