After Effects Skills for Claude Code

Searching for an After Effects skill turns up two skills with the same name and almost nothing in common. One automates the application; the other teaches motion craft. The craft route is after-effects from dylantarre/animation-principles, with 859 installs (skills.sh registry). The automation route is after-effects from aedev-tools/adobe-agent-skills, with 583 installs and 53 bundled files.

Key takeaways

• aedev-tools after-effects (583 installs) generates ExtendScript and runs it through osascript. It ships 53 files in all: a 20,629-character SKILL.md, 41 .jsx scripts, 9 rule files, 1 API-version reference and the runner.sh launcher.
• dylantarre after-effects (859 installs) is the more installed of the two, and it writes no automation at all. It maps Disney's 12 animation principles onto After Effects keyframes and expressions.
• The web handoff is Lottie. lottie from heygen-com/hyperframes has 69,051 installs (skills.sh registry), far more than either After Effects skill, because the output matters more to web work than the editor does.
• aedev-tools requires macOS with After Effects installed and the "Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network" preference enabled. It is not a cloud skill.
• Everything here is video and vector output. For motion inside a React app, start at the animation sub-niche hub, which lists the web-side skills such as css-animations (72,304 installs).

What can Claude Code do inside After Effects?

The aedev-tools skill (583 installs) reads and changes a live project: it generates JSX ExtendScript, executes it through osascript on macOS, and wraps every mutation in an undo group. Its workflow starts with query scripts run in --background mode so After Effects never steals focus, then writes results to a JSON file the agent reads back.

The 41 bundled scripts cover the chores that eat a motion designer's afternoon: batch-rename.jsx, batch-expression.jsx, font-replace.jsx, relink-footage.jsx, render-queue-batch.jsx, layer-stagger.jsx, copy-ease.jsx and true-comp-duplicator.jsx among them. expression-errors.jsx scans a project for broken expressions, and project-audit.jsx runs a health check across the whole file.

What is the best After Effects skill for Claude Code?

dylantarre after-effects is the pick for most work, with 859 installs against 583 for the automation skill (skills.sh registry). The two are complementary.

npx skills add aedev-tools/adobe-agent-skills --skill after-effects

Use aedev-tools when the task is mechanical: renaming 200 layers, swapping a font across every comp, or queueing renders. Use the dylantarre skill when the task is judgement: what the timing should be, where the anticipation goes, how long the settle takes. The best skills for frontend design page ranks the broader design set, and the frontend design category holds the rest.

How does the animation-principles skill change the output?

The dylantarre animation-principles skill replaces vague direction with frame counts. Its timing table reads 2 to 4 frames for snappy, 6 to 8 for quick, 12 to 15 for normal pace, 20 to 30 for slow and heavy, and 40 or more for dramatic, with 24fps for a cinematic feel and 30fps for a smoother one. Anticipation gets a concrete structure: frames 0 to 10 for the wind-up, 10 to 12 for the transition, 12 to 30 for the main action, 30 to 40 for the settle.

It also hands Claude real expressions rather than prose. The squash-and-stretch expression preserves volume by driving X from Y, and the overshoot expression takes an amplitude, a frequency and a decay so a value can be pushed 20 to 50 percent past realistic and settle back. The same repo carries 143 other motion skills in the catalog, including motion-designer (1,539 installs) and video-motion-graphics (2,283 installs).

How do you get an After Effects animation onto a website?

Export to Lottie. lottie-bodymovin (583 installs) is the bridge skill: it restates the same 12 principles for a Lottie export and pairs each one with the runtime call that controls it, such as anim.playSegments([0, 10], true) for an anticipation beat and anim.setSpeed(1.5) for squash timing. The playback half carries far more weight, at 69,051 installs and 41,240 repo stars for hyperframes lottie (skills.sh registry, GitHub). The Lottie animations guide covers that half of the pipeline in full, and the official Lottie documentation from Airbnb documents the player APIs.

A complete starter stack

• dylantarre after-effects (859 installs) for timing and principle decisions
• aedev-tools after-effects (583 installs) for batch work inside the app on macOS
• lottie-bodymovin (583 installs) for the export decisions
• hyperframes lottie (69,051 installs) for playback and control in the browser

Common pitfalls

• Expecting the aedev-tools skill (583 installs) to work on Linux or in CI. It calls osascript against a running macOS copy of After Effects, and it will not run anywhere else.
• Skipping the scripting preference. Without Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network enabled under Preferences, Scripting and Expressions, runner.sh reports that the script did not produce a result file.
• Treating dylantarre after-effects as automation. It emits keyframe plans, expressions and timing notes for a person or another skill to apply, not commands.

The dylantarre repo was last pushed on December 30, 2025 and the aedev-tools repo on March 2, 2026 (GitHub), so check the After Effects version table in references/ae-api-versions.md before relying on a newer API.

Common questions