{"slug": "show-hn-sketchling-a-hand-drawn-animation-language-for-coding-agents", "title": "Show HN: Sketchling – a hand-drawn animation language for coding agents", "summary": "Sketchling, a hand-drawn animation language for coding agents, was released this weekend by a developer who tested it with Devin, resulting in a 3-minute, 9-scene short film. The TypeScript library uses rough.js and GSAP through headless Chromium, offering shapes with parameters like weight, looseness, and energy, plus tools like a linter. Five other agents produced distinct styles (pixel art, clean line, clay, 3D, jazz club), and the library includes procedural walk cycles, camera movement, particles, and a sound library.", "body_md": "I built sketchling this weekend to see if agents can draw something that looks natural and hand-drawn if given the right primitives. This was inspired by Manim after watching how powerful an agent-native way to produce animations can be.\n\nIt is a small typescript library with shapes that take character parameters like weight, looseness, and energy. It renders through rough.js and GSAP through a headless chromium browser. It has tools like a built-in linter and is meant to be agent-native.\n\nAs a test, I gave the library to Devin cold with minimal instructions and it came back with a 3 minute, 9 scene short film which I found cool! I also had 5 more agents each try a different style, pixel art, clean line, clay, 3D, even a jazz club scene with its own music, and they all came out looking different which was awesome to see.\n\nI have added procedural walk cycles, camera movement, particle movement, and a small sound library as well. It is very early and has Chromium and ffmpeg as dependencies, which is more setup than I would like. I'm also honestly not sure how far this goes past the kind of demos I've shown here. Would love any and all feedback!\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252149)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-sketchling-a-hand-drawn-animation-language-for-coding-agents", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/AnayGarodia/sketchling", "published_at": "2026-08-11 01:18:16+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-11 01:41:10.166711+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "generative-ai", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["Sketchling", "Devin", "rough.js", "GSAP", "Chromium", "ffmpeg", "Manim"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-sketchling-a-hand-drawn-animation-language-for-coding-agents", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-sketchling-a-hand-drawn-animation-language-for-coding-agents.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-sketchling-a-hand-drawn-animation-language-for-coding-agents.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-sketchling-a-hand-drawn-animation-language-for-coding-agents.jsonld"}}