Two Markdown files, 4900 stars: how a designer with 6K followers pushed a skill repo with before-and-after videos

At Nov 4, 00:00 Beijing time, Indian designer Jaimin Kataria (@jaimintf, about 6k followers) posted three lines on X: "unslop any app.", a repo link, and a website link. As with dozens of his earlier posts, it came with a before/after video of one app (inferred, the post text doesn't say). The post got 205k views and 2,955 likes. The next day, the repo Appllama/appllama-skills, from his company, gained 783 stars, its biggest single-day gain since it was created 85 days earlier. The repo contains only two SKILL.md files. Someone else built the same thing and got only 3 stars. This piece explains what made the difference and whether you could replicate it.

"If your app still looks like the one on the left"

Almost all of Jaimin's posts follow one format. The Aug 26 one read:

if your app still looks like the one on the left, you're doing it wrong. i used the same prompt. same model. the one on the right used appllama mcp + skills prompt ↓

("If your app still looks like the left one, you're doing it wrong. Same prompt, same model, the right one uses appllama's MCP and skills. Prompt below.") The left is the model's raw output, the right is the version with his skill connected. Which one looks more like a properly shipped iOS app is obvious from the images alone, no text needed. This one got 260k views.

His X bio is a single line: "i study top-earning ios apps so you don't have to."

What it is

Appllama is a paid website from a small Indian company (Antmind Ventures, two co-founders). It takes screenshots of high-earning iOS apps and turns them into a searchable design library, claiming 1,890 apps and 87k screenshots, and it also offers an MCP for AI coding tools. appllama-skills is two agent skills the company open-sourced. You install them with one npx skills add command into Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex:

• appllama-usage: teaches the agent how to call Appllama's MCP to study what the "winners" in a category look like. Requires a paid Appllama account.
• appllama-app-design-skill: teaches the agent to build interfaces with the native feel of Expo / React Native. The rules are detailed: follow Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, use system-native controls, specify which screens can go back and which are "one-way doors" (you can't return to the paywall after paying), decide when animations should be added and make them track finger speed, and verify by recording the full flow in a simulator and checking it frame by frame rather than taking one screenshot. The README specifically notes the skill works standalone without the MCP.

The repo was created Aug 13, hasn't had a commit since Sep 6, and has 11 commits total.

How the stars climbed step by step

The repo's star curve is a series of steps: normally it gains anywhere from single digits to a few dozen a day, then after one of his posts goes out, it jumps a level the next day.

(Views and like counts come from the X posts themselves, 11-06; star counts come from GitHub's daily numbers.) By Nov 6, the repo had 4,903 stars and 249 forks. On skills.sh, the two skills had been installed 10.9k times combined, and the standalone design skill accounted for 6k of that.

Breaking it down, he used four tactics:

One video format, used over and over. Same prompt, same model: one side without the skill, one side with it. Two phone screens side by side, before and after. Whether the design is good, which is hard to explain in a feed, became something anyone could judge at a glance: which one looks more like a real app.

Comparison posts go out as soon as a new model drops. Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, Google's new model, Kimi: every time, a "same prompt, compare the models" post. These don't link the repo directly, but they get the most views (the Sep 4 one got 948k). They grow his own follower base, so the next post that does link the repo gets seen.

Riding the buzzword. On Oct 27, @heydamir posted "Unslopping a vibecoded dashboard", 2M views, and "unslop" became a buzzword. His heydamir/unslop repo picked up 10k stars in a week. Three days later Jaimin posted "deslop", and a week after that "unslop", the two biggest step-ups this repo has had recently.

Putting himself on the list of must-have repos. The "5 skills every iOS app needs" and "reverse engineer any ios app" posts both list his own repo alongside Expo's official repo, Vercel, and Emil Kowalski. Readers who bookmarked the whole list gave him a star too, and he landed second on it.

After that, others helped spread it: Chinese blogger @slashui reposted it in Oct 27 (30k views, and part of the 10-28 +399 came from Chinese-speaking users), @ErnestoSOFTWARE with 65k followers, several "design inspiration site" lists, Reddit's r/BestGitHubRepos, and skill directories like cursor.directory also picked it up. Whether any of this was paid promotion isn't visible from outside.

The same thing, but another team got 3 stars

It isn't the only "design library + MCP + skill" project, and others got there earlier with more data:

(Stars from GitHub, 11-06; install counts from skills.sh, 11-06.)

ScreensDesign's positioning is almost identical to Appllama's, and its library is bigger, yet its skill repo has 3 stars. The difference isn't the product, it's whether someone posts videos on X every day. If you want a product-level difference: Mobbin's and ScreensDesign's skills are just instructions for "how to call our API," useless without a subscription. Appllama split out a design skill that works without payment, and its stars and installs weren't blocked by a paywall.

Looking wider, general "give AI taste, remove the AI feel" skills are already crowded: Leonxlnx/taste-skill at 111k stars, pbakaus/impeccable at 105k, emilkowalski/skills at 54k, Nutlope/hallmark at 49k, and heydamir/unslop at 10k in a week. Most of them lean toward the web. Appllama occupies a narrow spot: native mobile only, specifically Expo / React Native.

Could you follow it?

What's copyable is a combination: a design skill scoped to one platform that works standalone, plus a video format that turns into a before/after comparison. The repo itself is two Markdown files, writable in a weekend. The hard part is landing a post every week that the feed amplifies.

Slots still open (my guess, based on the competitor table above and what the generic skills lean toward): Android / Material 3 native feel, SwiftUI native (twostraws's one is about code conventions, not design), WeChat Mini Programs, Flutter, mini-game UI, e-commerce product detail pages. What they have in common: AI output looks fake at a glance, and once fixed it looks real. That makes it easy to film as a left-right before/after.

Not worth chasing: yet another general "anti-AI-feel" web design skill. That space has top repos at the hundred-thousand-star level, and unslop just absorbed a wave of attention.

If it were you

B. The playbook is clear and genuinely replicable: Jaimin has only 6k followers, and what he relied on was a video format and a posting rhythm, not a big account or big-company backing. But nearly all the stars came from him posting consistently for three months. The skill itself is something anyone could write, and comparable Mobbin and ScreensDesign repos sit at 64 and 3 stars. You're betting on whether you can produce comparison videos that get recommended.

Who it suits: developers who design well enough to make interfaces that look like properly shipped apps on one platform; people willing to post two or three videos a week on X and keep at it for three months; ideally someone already known in one circle: Expo, SwiftUI, Flutter, or mini programs.

Who it doesn't suit: people who want to publish the repo and wait for stars (ScreensDesign is the cautionary tale); people planning another general web "de-AI" skill; domains where before/after differences aren't visible (backend, CLI tools).

How to build it: pick a platform and turn "native feel" into concrete rules: which system controls to use, how navigation works, when not to add animation, and frame-by-frame verification in a simulator or on a real device. Follow Appllama's approach and state clearly that it works with no external service. List it on skills.sh and cursor.directory, and put a before/after image and one install command on the first screen of the README.

How to get users: each post carries one left/right comparison video, with an opening line short enough to fit on one line ("unslop any flutter app."), and the link on the second line. On the day a new model launches, post "same prompt, compare the models" to build followers. When a keyword starts trending, post a take within three days. Publish your own "the 5 skills every X-platform app needs" list and put your repo next to that platform's official repo. If you're targeting the Chinese community, bring the same playbook to the Chinese X community and Jike, where bloggers like @slashui will repost.

Deadline: there's no hard deadline, but for each major model release and each design buzzword, the window is only three to five days. The heat of "unslop" probably won't last past November (inferred).

Signs you've misjudged it: ① you post comparison videos for a full month, single posts stay under 20k views, and stars never reach 300, which would mean the earlier results came from Jaimin's personal account and luck, and the format itself doesn't work; ② Expo, Google (Flutter / Android), or a hundred-thousand-star general skill like taste-skill or impeccable ships an official mobile version, and the niche gets absorbed; ③ the reverse: if Mobbin or ScreensDesign starts posting comparison videos daily the way Appllama does, and their skill repos also pass 1000 stars within a month, then the path is open to whoever moves first, and you need to claim a platform quickly.

Data and sources

• GitHub: the Appllama/appllama-skills README, commit history, and daily star counts (10-17 to 11-06); the 8-30 and its 409 stars come from Wayback Machine snapshots; competitor repo star counts 11-06.
• skills.sh: total agent skill installs for appllama/appllama-skills, mobbin/skills, and screensdesign, 11-06.
• X: posts from @jaimintf (8-22, 8-26, 9-04, 10-27, 10-30 (two posts), 11-04; views and likes as of 11-06); posts from @heydamir 10-27, @slashui 10-27, @ErnestoSOFTWARE 11-02. The numbers for the other rows in the table come from X search and were not opened post by post.
• appllama.io homepage, /mcp and /pricing (11-06): MCP is only available on Pro; Team is $16 per seat per month, and the page shows a limited-time 38% discount.
• Company and founders: the Appllama company page on LinkedIn and the personal pages of Jaimin Kataria and Nikhil Akki.
• Star growth and posts are matched by date. About 2,000 stars in September, and we can't say which specific posts drove them, since there are no day-by-day numbers. The match is approximate.