Best micro-interaction skills for Claude Code

Button hovers, form feedback, and state transitions decide whether an interface feels responsive or dead, yet they are the first thing an AI agent skips when it scaffolds a UI. A micro-interaction skill fixes the default; the strongest pick is ui-animation, and the full motion cluster lives on the animation hub.

Key takeaways

• ui-animation by mblode tops the micro-interaction picks with 7,245 installs (skills.sh registry), creating hardware-accelerated UI animations that go beyond what opacity and transform alone can do.
• In React codebases, framer-motion-animator (8,041 installs) generates production-ready Framer Motion code for entrances, gestures, scroll animations, and micro-interactions.
• transitions-dev (5,752 installs, 2,094 stars) exists so teams stop reinventing timing curves and easing functions on every project.
• Design-side, micro-interaction-spec (904 installs, 1,846 stars) writes reusable specifications for hovers, form feedback, and swipe gestures before any code exists.
• LottieFiles ships its own motion-design skill (4,674 installs, 644 stars) for consistent motion choreography across UI animations and Lottie sequences.

What is the best micro-interaction skill for Claude Code?

The best micro-interaction skill is ui-animation by mblode, at 7,245 installs (skills.sh registry, GitHub). It focuses on hardware-accelerated UI animation, the category of effects that need compositor-friendly properties and careful will-change usage rather than a quick CSS transition.

npx skills add mblode/agent-skills --skill ui-animation

Two strong alternatives: framer-motion-animator (8,041 installs) is the highest-installed skill in the cluster and generates Framer Motion code for React entrances, gestures, and scroll-linked micro-interactions, while transitions-dev (5,752 installs, 2,094 stars) standardizes state transitions and easing so a codebase stops accumulating one-off 0.3s ease values. For the wider ranked list, see the web animation skills guide.

How do you make an AI-built UI feel polished?

Polish comes from consistent motion rules, and two skills encode them. motion-design by LottieFiles (4,674 installs, 644 stars) generates professional motion choreography across UI animations, micro-interactions, and Lottie sequences, so durations and easings follow one system. micro-interactions (914 installs) applies classical animation principles like anticipation and follow-through to ordinary UI elements. For taste-level reference, emilkowalski-motion (781 installs, 79,022 stars) reproduces the restrained interaction style associated with Emil Kowalski's work on web UIs.

Should micro-interactions be specified before they are coded?

On team projects, yes. micro-interaction-spec (904 installs, 1,846 stars) produces clear, reusable specifications for button hovers, form feedback, and swipe gestures, which means a designer and an agent share one source of truth instead of negotiating each animation in review comments. Solo developers shipping fast can skip straight to ui-animation or framer-motion-animator and let the skill's defaults carry the spec. Related picks sit in the UI design hub.

Which properties keep micro-interactions fast?

Stick to compositor-friendly properties: transform and opacity animate without triggering layout, while width, height, and top force reflow on every frame. This is the core lesson ui-animation (7,245 installs) encodes, and it is the difference between a hover that runs at 120fps and one that stutters on mid-range phones. Respect prefers-reduced-motion as well; MDN documents the media query at developer.mozilla.org, and the W3C's accessibility guidance on animation from interactions lives at w3.org.

A complete starter stack

• ui-animation (7,245 installs) - hardware-accelerated micro-interactions as the base layer.
• framer-motion-animator (8,041 installs) - React entrances, gestures, and scroll effects.
• transitions-dev (5,752 installs) - one consistent system of timing curves and easings.
• motion-design (4,674 installs) - motion choreography rules from LottieFiles.
• micro-interaction-spec (904 installs) - written specs when a team needs a contract.

Common pitfalls

• Animating layout properties like width or margin for hover effects, which forces reflow and stutters on low-end devices.
• Giving every element a different duration: without a system like transitions-dev, AI-generated UIs accumulate a dozen inconsistent easing values.
• Adding motion with no reduced-motion fallback, which fails WCAG guidance and annoys users who disabled animation at the OS level.

Install counts from the skills.sh leaderboard, snapshot 2026-07-17. One base skill plus one system skill turns default AI output into an interface that feels engineered.

Common questions