Agent skills
Name a look. Your agent films it.
Four new skills teach coding agents to direct: 24 visual styles, hand-drawn cartoons, karaoke music videos and seven video genres. Every film on this page was made by an agent from the one-line request above it, following one skill, and rendered by Helios.
$ npx skills add BintzGavin/heliosdesign/motion-styles
24 styles, each with rules an agent can check.
A style is a set of invariants: what the picture is made of, which colours are allowed and what they mean, how things move, what never happens. Each style card spells those out with a checklist of signature features and the rendering trick that makes the look work, next to a demo page that passes helios verify.
$ npx skills add BintzGavin/helios/skills/design/motion-stylesYouMake a 10-second retro synthwave title sequence for a night-drive playlist called 'Afterglow Highway'.
YouMake a 10-second risograph-style poster animation for a community bike festival called 'Spoke & Ink'.
YouMake a 10-second Swiss-grid typographic film about Helios: every frame is a function of time.
YouMake a 10-second watercolor travel-journal opener for 'Three Days on Lake Varne'.
YouMake a 12-second blueprint-style explainer of how a mechanical pencil advances its lead.
YouMake a 10-second pixel-art reveal for an indie game called 'Lanternfall'.
All 24 styles
Each thumbnail is a frame from that style’s own demo page. Open one to read its card.
Synthwave / VHS80s chrome titles over a neon grid, on tape
ASCII / CRTimages made of glyphs on an amber phosphor tube
Pixel art16-bit game scenes on a fixed palette
HUDa sci-fi interface scanning and locking on
Dark keynoteproduct UI as the hero on a dark stage
Risographtranslucent inks, misregistered and halftoned
Silkscreenopaque stepped inks pulled on camera
Halftone dossiera case file of dots, stamps and evidence
Woodcutlight carved out of black
Ukiyo-ewoodblock colour blocks on a handscroll
Swiss grida strict grid and one signal colour
Bauhausprimaries and geometry, one action per beat
60s spy titlesa cut-paper title sequence
Art decogold keylines unfolding from a centre axis
Blueprintwhite line drafting on a cyanotype sheet
Flat vectorfriendly shapes in one continuous shot
Shape morphone shape becoming the next on every beat
One linea single unbroken line drawing everything
Cel boilhand-inked cels with boiling lines and smears
Aurora glasssoft light fields behind frosted glass
Watercolor / inka journal page painting itself
Sticker explainerdie-cut stickers and camera flights
Isometrica pastel iso city growing tile by tile
Variety captionsloud caption stickers popping per character
guided/cartoon-short
Cartoons that act.
The agent designs its own character, storyboards every shot by what the viewer has to understand and for how long, and animates feelings instead of swapping faces.
- Timed by reads. Each shot lists what the viewer must notice, one thing at a time, so nothing is over before it lands.
- Faces act. The eyes squint shut before a change, the face swaps under the squint, a take springs out and settles.
- Lines boil. Every element redraws twelve times a second from its own seed, so the ink wobbles like hand-drawn animation without any frame depending on the last.
$ npx skills add BintzGavin/helios/skills/guided/cartoon-shortguided/music-video
Every word on the voice.
The picture moves on the beat; the words light up when they’re sung, never before. The skill gets word and syllable timings, from a cue file up to forced alignment on the vocal, and builds the edit from the lyrics and the beat map.
- Lyrics looked up by content. Scenes cut on the last beat before a line, so re-timing the lyrics re-times the video.
- Words in the world. Each section carries the lyric differently, and the chorus escalates every time it returns.
- Checked, not hoped.
helios verify --cuesconfirms every word is on screen at its time.
The song in this film, lyrics and backing track, was written and synthesized by the agent for this demo.
$ npx skills add BintzGavin/helios/skills/guided/music-videoguided/video-recipes
Know the genre before the first frame.
Seven genres from hundreds of code-made videos, each with its structure, the hard technical part, its gotchas and the stills to check, plus a brief template that makes the agent decide the concept, the copy and what’s banned before it writes code.
$ npx skills add BintzGavin/helios/skills/guided/video-recipesYouMake an 18-second powers-of-ten zoom from a beach down to the crystal structure of a sand grain.
YouMake an 18-second step-by-step explainer for brewing pour-over coffee, with live measurements.
YouMake a 15-second one-shape UI morph loop for a podcast app called 'Murmur'.
YouMake a 15-second kinetic typography film of the line 'Video is light over time.'
- Scale diveOne continuous zoom through nested levels, from a beach to a crystal lattice.
- ProcessAn empty glass, plate or box becomes the finished thing, with live measurements.
- Era timelineCenturies in a drawn medium, a rolling year counter, one motif per era.
- Mechanism and proofA machine whose every motion is one logical step.
- Kinetic typeWords become objects, paced to the phrase, with real stillness.
- UI morph loopOne shape never cuts: button, player, slider, chart and back.
- Pixel spriteA pixel-art character loop on a fixed palette at integer scale.
How these films were made.
One request, one skill, one agent per film. The agent read the skill, wrote the brief, storyboard or style frames it asks for, looked at stills and contact sheets, fixed what it saw, passed helios verify and the flash check, then rendered with helios render. The source page is linked under every film.
The libraries are opt-in. An agent asked for a video with no style named designs an original look from a random seed and only offers the library; it opens a style card when you name one. That keeps 24 good looks from becoming the only 24 looks.
Helios calls no generative model: every frame is drawn by code the agent wrote. The skills adapt techniques from open-source projects, credited in THIRD_PARTY.md.
$ npx skills add BintzGavin/helios