Emil Design Eng

Design Engineering

Use Emil Kowalski's craft heuristics as a supplier beneath the active project and Studio. Project tokens, behavior engines, and Studio motion defaults always win; values in these references are examples when the project has no answer.

This Cortex adaptation folds the upstream review-animations, improve-animations, and find-animation-opportunities workflows into one owner instead of maintaining three copies of the same motion standard. Source: emilkowalski/skills, reviewed at commit 70744e3816f1d93eafb697161a8b880a7384c5ff.

Pick a branch

If invoked without a task, say you can help with craft, review, audit, or opportunity finding and ask which surface to inspect.

Shared posture

• Train taste by studying why strong interfaces work, not by copying their skin.
• Assume invisible details compound: response, origin, interruption, edge cases, and reduced-motion behavior matter together.
• Default to restraint. The best motion change is often deletion.
• Judge frequency before style. Keyboard and very high-frequency actions should feel immediate.
• Give every animation one functional purpose: feedback, spatial continuity, state indication, explanation, or preventing a jarring change.

Workflow

1. Load project truth. Read the active Studio profile when present, then identify the stack, motion libraries, tokens, component engine, product personality, and interaction frequency. This step is complete when a recommendation cannot accidentally introduce a parallel motion language.
2. Choose the branch. Do not combine a read-only audit with implementation unless the user explicitly asks to move from one to the other.
3. Load only the needed references:
   • Animation Framework for the shared decision gate, timing examples, springs, and debugging.
   • Component Patterns for press, popover, transition, clip-path, and drag behavior.
   • Performance and Accessibility for rendering, input, and user-preference constraints.
   • Review and Audit for review, audit, or opportunities execution and output.
   • Plan Template only after an audit finding has been selected for a durable plan.
4. Execute the branch.
   • craft: implement only the requested interaction, using the project's existing primitives and tokens.
   • review: inspect the stated diff or surface and report motion findings; do not edit.
   • audit: survey the requested codebase scope, vet every cited finding, and stop for selection before writing plans. Source code remains read-only.
   • opportunities: sweep for missing feedback or continuity, reject most candidates through the gate, and report at most seven.
5. Verify at the right level. Mechanical checks prove the code runs. Slow-motion, frame-by-frame, interruption, reduced-motion, and real-device checks prove the interaction feels right. Name any check you could not run.

Completion

• craft is complete when the requested state graph works with project primitives and tokens, build checks pass, and the interaction has been feel-checked.
• review is complete when every finding cites evidence and the verdict is explicit.
• audit is complete when the scoped motion surface is accounted for and selected plans are self-contained enough for a context-free executor.
• opportunities is complete when every reported candidate passed the full gate and considered-but-rejected candidates are visible.