Performance craft

Skill jangles-byte/atelier/skills/performance-craft

Design that holds its frame rate — because janky motion is failed design, not a separate engineering concern. Per-platform rendering discipline: compositor-friendly CSS and GPU layers on the web; ProMotion/adaptive-refresh timing, Metal particle/overdraw budgets, and efficiency-core scheduling on Apple platforms; draw-call and fill-rate budgets in game engines. Includes the graceful-degradation ladder — what to cut first when the frame budget is blown. Use this skill whenever animation stutters, scrolling janks, "feels laggy", fans spin up, battery drains from an always-on animation, before shipping ANY continuous animation (particles, ambient motion, canvas/WebGL scenes), or when choosing which properties/effects to animate.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add jangles-byte/atelier --skill performance-craft

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

2 stars2 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

2.4 KB, 404 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Performance Craft

A dropped frame is a design defect the user feels before they can name it. This skill treats the frame budget as a design material: know the budget, spend it on what the philosophy values, and degrade in the order that does the least visual damage.

The budget

Frame time = 1000 / refresh rate: 8.3ms at 120Hz, 16.6ms at 60Hz — minus the platform's own compositing overhead. Design for the display the audience has: ProMotion phones and most gaming displays are 120Hz; never hardcode 60. Measure before and after any motion work — profilers, not vibes (DevTools Performance / Instruments' Animation Hitches / engine profilers).

Which reference to load

Situation	Load
Web: CSS/JS/canvas/WebGL animation, scroll jank, layout thrash	`references/web-rendering.md`
Apple: SwiftUI/UIKit hitches, Metal, ProMotion, battery/thermals	`references/apple-silicon.md`
Game engines, particles at scale, and the degradation ladder	`references/budgets-and-degradation.md`

Non-negotiables

Animate compositor-friendly properties (transform, opacity — and their platform equivalents) unless a measured reason says otherwise.
Timing from delta-time or the platform's frame callback, never a hardcoded 1/60 assumption.
Always-on ambient animation must be provably cheap: paused off-screen, GPU-only, and off the performance cores / not preventing CPU idle.
prefers-reduced-motion (and platform equivalents) is also the low-power path — wire them together.
When the budget is blown, cut by the degradation ladder — never ship the stutter, and never fix it by cutting the design's primary feedback motion first.

What ships with it: 3 files

12.3 KB alongside SKILL.md