After my last post about turning someone’s content into a skill, a few people asked the same question: how do you know who’s actually worth learning from, given all the AI slop out there?
Look for proof of work.
If I wanted to learn font design, I’d read everything Rasmus has ever said about fonts, because he made Inter. I wouldn’t search for the most viral typography thread.
Shipped work that strangers pay for or depend on is the best signal there is.
Before taking someone’s advice, open their GitHub or personal site. Find something they built that people actually use: a product, an open-source library, something tangible.
This is why followers and likes are not a great proxy for what’s good and what’s not.
Many people are good at posting shiny things, but as soon as you look for any tangible work, it falls apart. Mainly because building is a completely different skill, and that’s the skill you actually want.
You want to learn from the builders. Be allergic to the talkers.
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Something I like to do recently is ask Fable to make me a skill out of someone’s publicly shared knowledge.
If someone writes about say marketing for developers, I send Fable a link to their articles and tell it to make me a skill out of it.
Then before sending a marketing email for example, I ask Fable to run it through that skill and show me how it can be improved.
This applies to anything really, writing, designing, etc. as long as there’s some publicly available data that you think is good.
So again, taste plays a role here as well.
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The people getting great UI results with AI aren’t using a secret model or a magic prompt. They know what a great interface looks like, and they know how to steer AI towards it.
Work that used to take a week takes a day, and the quality bar doesn’t drop, it goes up, because you spend your time on the things that matter.
At the end of the day, people that use AI best are the ones that were excellent before LLMs as well. The ones that got the fundamentals right, went that extra mile, and cared about the thing they were working on.
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Here are a few example prompts that go well with the /find-animation-opportunities skill:
Scoped to one view with extra context for more accurate judgement:
“Find animation opportunities in the checkout flow. It’s used a few times per session by each customer, factor this in.”
Combined with the /improve-animations skill, this works extremely well:
“Look through the dashboard UI for places that would benefit from motion, tell me what you'd skip and why, then turn the top suggestion into an improve-animations plan.”
Using this as a “shield” instead of trying to find ways to add animations:
“Before we add any motion to this dashboard, is there anything here that should animate at all?”
Right after an agent builds new UI:
“I just generated this settings page and it has zero motion. What should animate and what shouldn’t?”
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New skill: /find-animation-opportunities
Search your UI for places that would genuinely benefit from motion, while also telling you what not to animate.
My skills repo has gained 8,000 GitHub stars in a week, it surpassed Vaul and is 300 stars short of surpassing Sonner.
Not greatest metrics of success, but it’s a good indication of how the times change.
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New skill: /improve-animations
Inspired by @shadcn’s improve skill I made one specifically for animations.
Use your most capable model to audit animations in your project and hand the execution to cheaper models.
Fable is available through July 12, so make good use out of it!
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Fixed this small bug in Linear’s app today which I often see in other apps as well. Here’s a small before/after.
The issue:
When you open a popover inside a modal (think a custom select), clicking outside the popover to close it also closes the modal.
The desired behavior is to close the select on click outside while keeping the modal open.
This often happens because custom dropdowns or select components are rendered in a portal. The modal then treats the interaction as an outside click because, technically, the dropdown isn’t inside the modal in the DOM, it’s rendered elsewhere via a portal.
The fix depends on your setup, whether it’s Radix/Base UI, fully custom etc. But since you now know the cause of it, you can ask your agent to fix it for you!
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New skill: /apple-design
Apple’s WWDC videos are a goldmine of knowledge. I’ve combed through my favorite ones and came up with 17 design and motion principles.
Use them to review existing work or when working on something new to get it right.
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That’s why I also like small apps that do one thing well.
Cleanshot for screenshots.
Eagle for inspiration.
Obsidian for notes.
Things for to-dos.
Cron for calendar.
The reason why my personal site has just one font size, monchrome colors, and looks “boring” is simply because I don’t consider myself a great designer.
By using as little variation as possible, I limit the amount of design mistakes I can make, and instead, I try to make the content itself (hopefully) interesting.
I know a few tricks to not make my work look like shit, but it’s far from the skills of a designer working at Linear for example.
To expand on that, from what I’ve seen, most “design engineers” excel at either design or code, not both. I never believed I can be exceptional at both, and I haven’t seen many people that are really, really great at both.
To me, trying to be great at both is like 2-in-1 shampoo conditioner, it never really works as well as two separate products designed specifically to do one thing well.
That’s why I made open source projects like Sonner and Vaul, that require some design sense, but these are far from sharing design kits for example.
And again, there are exceptions, but you shouldn’t expect all design engineers to design and build absolutely amazing things on their own.
I think most design engineers (including me) are just engineers that care about design, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at designing (and vice versa).
To me, the title design engineer is misleading in that it’s more of a description of where one’s interests overlap instead of actually indicating high skill in both disciplines.
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The reason why my personal site has just one font size, monchrome colors, and looks “boring” is simply because I don’t consider myself a great designer.
By using as little variation as possible, I limit the amount of design mistakes I can make, and instead, I try to make the content itself (hopefully) interesting.
I know a few tricks to not make my work look like shit, but it’s far from the skills of a designer working at Linear for example.
To expand on that, from what I’ve seen, most “design engineers” excel at either design or code, not both. I never believed I can be exceptional at both, and I haven’t seen many people that are really, really great at both.
To me, trying to be great at both is like 2-in-1 shampoo conditioner, it never really works as well as two separate products designed specifically to do one thing well.
That’s why I made open source projects like Sonner and Vaul, that require some design sense, but these are far from sharing design kits for example.
And again, there are exceptions, but you shouldn’t expect all design engineers to design and build absolutely amazing things on their own.
I think most design engineers (including me) are just engineers that care about design, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at designing (and vice versa).
To me, the title design engineer is misleading in that it’s more of a description of where one’s interests overlap instead of actually indicating high skill in both disciplines.
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@AnaArsonist I remember not knowing what my avatar should be so I just used a piece of Raycast’s wallpaper (top left corner):
