Show HN: Sketchling – a hand-drawn animation language for coding agents

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.

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. It 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. As 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. I 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 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252149 Points: 1 Comments: 0