Stringers
GitHub open-source project · written 11-6
alexgreensh/anidoodle · alexgreensh

anidoodle: one reply, 620 stars in five days. How a hand-drawn Claude skill got the first bite of Opus 5.5 traffic

What it is An open-source skill you install into Claude Code / Codex that has AI draw 32 hand-drawn art styles in pure code, plus time-lapse videos of it drawing itself, scored short films, product launch videos, and web interactive illustrations. The same source renders identically every time.

Why it took off Opus 5.5's most viral trick was animating with code, and millions of people were asking how to do it. It shipped with ready-made tools and good finished work on launch day, replied under the hottest post, and got named in a roundup. Growth then continued through skill-directory sites, tutorial accounts, and frequent releases.

CHow you could ride this Don't build yet another code-drawn animation skill; that slot already has a hundred-plus entries, and the leader is several times bigger. Copy the playbook instead: bet on the most viral trick of the next model launch, have a tool ready, release it on launch day, and get traffic by replying under the top posts.

Grade C: the spike came from the one-time Opus 5.5 launch and riding its wave, and that window has passed. Over a hundred libraries are in the same slot, and projects that came two weeks later are several times bigger, with the idea already flattened. What's worth learning is the "launch-day positioning + replies under viral posts" playbook; copying this project specifically isn't worth it. Chatter in small circles
Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-09-22 · 1,434 stars · 7 days +233
GitHub · stars
8001k1.2k1.4k10-0910-1710-2410-3111-081.4k
Data 2026-10-09 → 2026-11-08 (31 days, 31 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one

In 2026 Sep 22, Claude Opus 5.5 launched, and within days, "animations Opus drew frame by frame in JavaScript" were flooding X. One person built an open-source skill, anidoodle, on launch day, then replied under the most viral post with a single line: "I just open-sourced a tool that does this." By Nov 6 it had 1,360 stars and 130 forks. Here's what it is, where the stars came from, who it's competing with, and how much room is left if you want to build a project that earns the same stars.

A reply under a post

In Sep 24, Addy Osmani (an Anthropic engineer, formerly on the Google Chrome team) posted: "Claude Opus 5.5 drew each frame of this animation in JavaScript. Here's 'how browsers work' in 40 seconds." It explained how browsers work in 40 seconds, with every frame drawn by Opus in code.

A reply under it came from Alex Greenshpun (alexgreensh on GitHub):

Beautiful! If anyone is looking for a skill to help do stuff like that, I just open sourced Anidoodle. Helps you illustrate and animate with 100% deterministic code.

The same day, Eric Buess posted a roundup of Opus 5.5 work that said "If you'd like to try this yourself, @alexgreensh open-sourced Anidoodle." anidoodle gained 112 stars that day, then +119, +197, +88, and +101 over the next four days (daily figures from Trendshift). Five days total: about 620 stars, roughly half its current count.

The repo wasn't a last-minute idea. It was created on Sep 22 11:20 (UTC), five hours before Opus 5.5 was officially announced, and the author teased on X that day: "Anidoodle skill. Coming soon to a GitHub near you ;)" Inference: the work was already underway and was held for launch day.

What it actually does

Install it into Claude Code, Codex, or any other agent that can read skills, and have the AI draw with code. The README opens with one line: "Hand-drawn art, written as code."

  • 32 hand-drawn styles: ballpoint, watercolor, charcoal smudge, woodblock ukiyo-e, ink wash, embroidery, pixel art, LEGO bricks... each written in code to match the strokes of the real medium.
  • The drawing process is the finished video: every style can produce a time-lapse of it drawing itself, in the same order a real artist would: watercolor starts with pencil then layers paint from light to dark, and woodblock prints the key block first, then overprints colors. The final frame matches the still image pixel for pixel.
  • The soundtrack is also written in code: 21 music styles, with chords and melodies generated on the fly, plus an optional 373 MB pack of real instrument samples. It also includes a checker that rejects soundtracks that sound like a known song.
  • Web interactive illustrations: a <ani-doodle> tag, for example a small robot beside a sign-up form that covers its eyes when you type a password.
  • Product launch video templates: four aspect ratios (16:9, 1:1, 4:5, 9:16), with captions and audio-video sync checks. The 77-second launch video at the top of the README: "every frame, every sound, made by anidoodle in code."
  • Same source, identical render every time: randomness can only come from a seeded function, each frame is a pure function, and per-frame hash checks are included.

It also builds review into the workflow: the user first approves a mood-setting still, then the full video is produced, then a separate sub-agent that didn't take part in production looks for problems, and only then is it rendered. One blogger who read the source (thesatyajit, 11-01) counted 1,843 files, 104 test files, and 9.8 MB of TypeScript. A skill-directory site gave it a rating of 9/10, with the comment "An unusually complete skill."

Where the stars came from

TimelineCumulative starsWhat happened
09-22About 10Repo created and teased on Opus 5.5 launch day
09-24 ~ 09-28About 630Replies under Addy Osmani's post and named in Eric Buess's roundup; daily +88 to +197
10-09859Picked up by skill-directory sites and tutorial accounts; daily +6 to +36
10-281,148
11-051,314+63 in a single day, the highest in the past month; the cause wasn't found
11-061,360Last 7 days +194, first 7 days +133

(GitHub stars; daily September figures from Trendshift. Forks are about 9.6% of stars, in line with similarly aged new repos, not looking inflated.)

Several forces, ranked by weight:

First, timing. Opus 5.5's most viral trick was "animating with code," and one Western civilization history animation reached 5.8M views (explainx.ai, 10-03). After millions watched, they all asked "how was this made?" and anidoodle was one of the few answers that week that you could install and that already had good finished work.

Second, riding other people's posts. The biggest wave coincided with Addy Osmani's reply and Eric Buess's mention, not with the author's own posts. The author's own posts drew modest engagement: a "how to draw an owl" tutorial clip got about 115 likes, and the 77-second launch video about 69 likes. The works' main job was to be reshared by others.

Third, the author already had a track record. The same person also built token-optimizer (2,907 stars) and attention-span (1,535 stars), both within the Claude Code tooling crowd. He is a co-founder of an AI consulting firm by day and runs a marketing community of 2,000 people. People believed in him from the start.

Fourth, catalog sites and tutorial accounts keep spreading it. Over a dozen skill directories have listed it, including skillsllm, claudemarketplaces, skillmart, and claudevideo.org (tagged "NEW SINCE OPUS 5.5"). npx skills add and /plugin marketplace add each install it in one line. Some creators are also using it for content: Josh Pocock 10-02 posted intros on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and LinkedIn with the caption "comment for the tutorial," funneling viewers to his own course. There are also explainer videos on Instagram, Threads, and French- and Russian-language YouTube. None of these videos have big view counts (866 views on Josh's TikTok), but there are many of them and they keep coming.

Fifth, frequent releases. There have been 27 releases from 9-22 to 10-31 (v0.1.0 through v0.10.1), and each one gives it another chance to show up in catalogs and feeds. The README is available in six languages: English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, French, and Spanish.

What hasn't happened: it hasn't been on Hacker News or Product Hunt, there's no press coverage, and no paid promotion.

Who it's competing with

A month after Opus 5.5 launched, over a hundred skill libraries appeared for having agents make animations and videos with code. One roundup listed 180 of them. Here are anidoodle's closest recent peers (star counts as of 11-06):

ProjectLaunchedStarsHow it differs from anidoodle
Vincentwei1021/video-shotcraft07-1917,238Remotion, for product promo videos. Commercial promos, not hand-drawn.
lemomo-ai/lemo-opuscar09-2612,613 (7 days +3,233)66 film-style templates. Launched four days later and is now 9× its size.
remotion-dev/skills01-196,409Remotion's official skill. A general video framework that doesn't care about visual style.
alchaincyf/huashu-art-motion (Huashu)10-066,370Built by a large Chinese-language account. 36 visual styles + 9 narration formats, nearly the same positioning. Launched two weeks later and is already 4.7× its size.
cth9191/animate10-041,562 (7 days +488)Also deterministic canvas animation, with 7 styles. Lighter, and growing faster than anidoodle.
Tejashmakwana/motionmaxxing10-061,378Makes "AI-looking" videos look like motion designer work.
buildwithhanif/claude-animation-skill09-23130Nearly the same tagline (Hand-drawn 2D animation, written as code), with fewer styles.

There are also forks that were renamed and reposted (MaTriXy/anidoodle, Anidoodle-Studio, etc.), plus Anthropic's own algorithmic-art and canvas-design skills.

Two things stand out. First, it isn't the biggest in this space: lemo-opuscar and huashu-art-motion, which came later, are both several times larger. That suggests the wave is wide enough for many projects, and the bigger accounts and those better at packaging a "style library" get the most. Second, its core idea (code only, identical output every time, the drawing process is the video) has already been copied by peers. What it still has going for it is completeness and output quality, and others can match those too.

What it still gets wrong

  • Too heavy. 3.3 MB of TypeScript, dozens of styles, a music engine, a sample pack, and launch-video templates. A blogger who read the source tried to run it, got stuck on the first command, and never rendered a single frame. The lighter cth9191/animate is catching up from the other end.
  • Unknown how far stars are from actual users. Catalog install data is incomplete.
  • Models are catching up. Opus 5.5 can make decent animations without installing any skill. The value of this kind of skill is shifting from "you can't make it without this" to "it's more reliable and looks better with this."

If it were you

Bottom line: building another "have an agent draw animations with code" skill is unlikely to earn stars right now. That category already has over a hundred libraries, and the top one has several times anidoodle's stars. What's worth learning is its playbook: on the day a new model launches, package that model's most viral trick into an installable tool, and get in on other people's viral posts.

Who it suits: developers who already have a half-finished tool and know a specific model's capabilities well, who can watch for the launch a few days ahead and ship a polished result on launch day. Having one or two agent-tooling repos with over a thousand stars helps, but isn't required.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone trying to ride the "code-drawn animation" wave now that it's already fading, or people who can't produce work that makes someone want to share it at a glance, and can only write a README.

How to do it:

  1. Bet on the next model launch. Every major model update produces a "wow trick" that spreads (this time it was code-drawn animation; the previous round had similar tricks from every vendor). Predict what it might be, build the tool to about 80% completion, and release it on launch day.
  2. Or fill gaps this category hasn't covered (inferred, not checked repo by repo): a lightweight version that outputs videos without the full Node setup; a version focused on one use case and done well (for example, only web mascots, only children's picture-book pages, or only hand-drawn data charts).
  3. Let the output serve as the ad: attach a GIF to each feature, make the launch video with the tool itself, and leave tutorial creators with material they can reuse directly.
  4. A one-line install command, submissions to the catalog sites, and a multilingual README should all be ready on day one.

How to get stars: don't count on your own launch post. Find the viral posts currently trending, reply under them with "if you want to build this, I just open-sourced a tool that does it," and include the finished output. Aim to get named in roundup posts. After that, treat every release as a small launch.

When it's too late: for this category, the window has already passed, since most traffic came in the first week after launch. For this playbook, the timing is the day of the next major model launch. Prepare a week early and you're too late.

Signs you misread it: if your reply on launch day gets no likes and stars stay in double digits after two or three days, either the trick you bet on was wrong or the output wasn't good enough. And if a new model can match your output without any skill installed, the gap in this direction has already been filled by the model itself.

GitHub repo ↗

Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
Competitors
NameWhereLaunchedScaleHow it differs from this one
lemomo-ai/lemo-opuscarOpen source2026-09-2612613★, +3233 over 7 daysA library of 66 film-style templates, focused on movie look. anidoodle focuses on hand-drawn visuals, the drawing process, and music composition.
Vincentwei1021/video-shotcraftOpen source2026-07-1917238★Commercial product promo videos built on Remotion. Not hand-drawn.
alchaincyf/huashu-art-motionOpen source2026-10-066370★A similar skill from a large Chinese-language account, with 36 visual styles + 9 narration formats, focused on explainer videos. No music engine or web interactivity.
remotion-dev/skillsOpen source2026-01-196409★Remotion's official React video skill. A general video framework that doesn't care about visual style.
cth9191/animateOpen source2026-10-041562★, +488 over 7 daysAlso deterministic programmatic canvas animation, with 7 styles. Lighter, and currently growing faster than anidoodle.
buildwithhanif/claude-animation-skillOpen source2026-09-23130★Nearly the same tagline (Hand-drawn 2D animation, written as code). Uses Node canvas, no browser needed, fewer styles.
hand-drawn-canvas-animation(Alexey Fateev)Open source2026-09Not verifiedA small, focused hand-drawn canvas skill. anidoodle is much larger (3.3 MB of TS), with music and a review workflow.
HyperFrames(HeyGen)Open source2026Promo video with 2.8k likesA general HTML/CSS/JS video framework with an editor. No visual styles provided.
anthropics/skills (algorithmic-art, canvas-design)Big-company features2025OfficialSingle generative art pieces or posters. Doesn't cover the drawing process or music-backed short films.
AI image and video generation (Midjourney, Sora, Veo)Big-company features—HugeDiffusion models: outputs aren't reproducible and characters are hard to keep consistent. anidoodle's selling point is that it doesn't use a generative model and its output is reproducible.
Where users come from
  • Verified Model launch event (Opus 5.5): Opus 5.5 launched on 2026-09-22. anidoodle's repo was created the same day at 11:20 UTC, and the author pre-announced it on X that day. During the "Opus 5.5 draws animation in JS" viral wave, one post hit 5.8M views (explainx.ai).
  • Verified Reply under a viral X post: under Addy Osmani's 9-24 "how browsers work" animation post, the author replied "I just open sourced Anidoodle." Stars rose by 112 that day, then grew by 3–88 per day over the following 197 days (Trendshift).
  • Verified Named by large X accounts: Eric Buess 9-24 recommended anidoodle in his roundup of Opus 5.5 work; AGI Hunt 10-07 and The Daily Commit 9-28 also included it.
  • Verified The author's own work and existing audience: an owl tutorial video with 115 likes, a launch video with 69 likes, and a Clawd Halloween short. The author already has token-optimizer (2907★) and attention-span (1535★), is active on LinkedIn, and is in a community of 2000 people, the 10x Marketers group.
  • Verified Catalog sites / plugin marketplaces: listed on over a dozen sites, including skillsllm, claudemarketplaces, flowy, skillsmp, onei, skillmart (9/10), and claudevideo.org. Installable in one line with npx skills add or /plugin marketplace add.
  • Verified TikTok / Instagram / LinkedIn / YouTube tutorial accounts: Josh Pocock (Stride AI Academy) 10-02 uses comment-to-DM to funnel viewers to his course, with 866 TikTok views. Aashish Pahwa runs Instagram tutorials, clone.creatives 11-05, and there are French and Russian YouTube explainers.
  • Inferred from Reddit: a post on r/ClaudeAI, 9-22 "Opus 5.5 creates a train journey drawn entirely in JavaScript", includes a repo link; upvotes and author not verified
  • Inferred Paid ads / PH / HN: none found.

Why alexgreensh/anidoodle worked

In one line: anidoodle is an open-source Agent Skill for Claude Code and Codex (Apache-2.0, TypeScript). It lets AI coding assistants draw illustrations with pure code, make time-lapse drawing-process videos, produce music-backed short films, product launch videos, and interactive web illustrations, in 32 hand-drawn styles. The same source produces pixel-identical output on every render.

Conclusion: it didn't grow through slow product work. It caught the viral wave around the Claude Opus 5.5 launch (2026-09-22), when everyone was posting "Opus draws animation in JS". The author created the repo on the day Opus 5.5 launched, then replied under Addy Osmani's viral post with "I just open sourced Anidoodle" and got named in Eric Buess's roundup. Over 9-24 to 9-28 days it gained about 620 stars. After that, catalog sites, TikTok/Instagram/LinkedIn tutorial accounts, and the author's own steady output kept it at 10–30 stars a day. Its product edge (determinism, a drawing process that is itself the video, a built-in music engine, and a review workflow) makes it look "complete and professional" among similar skills. But timing and riding the wave decided how far it got, not the differentiation itself. The category is very crowded now, and at least a dozen similar libraries have more stars.

---

1. Data

TimelinestarSource
2026-09-22 repo created (11:20 UTC; Opus 5.5 was announced at 16:31 UTC)0 → +10GitHub API; Trendshift daily table
9-24 / 9-25 / 9-26 / 9-27 / 9-28+112 / +119 / +197 / +88 / +101Trendshift trendshift.io/repositories/255135
9-29 – 10-14+6 to +36 per daySame as above
2026-10-09859Our github repo_day (deeply source)
2026-10-281148Same as above (census)
2026-11-04 / 11-05 (we record Beijing time: 11-05 +63, 11-06 +46)+69 / +44Trendshift; github repo
2026-11-061360 (GitHub API as of now 1377), forks 130–131Data card; GitHub API
  • Last 7 days +194, first 7 days +133 (data card). Fork-to-star ratio is about 9.6%, close to the median for similar new repos (about 11%), which doesn't look like star inflation.
  • On Trendshift it only made the charts on 9-25 (TypeScript #17) and 9-26 (#10). GitHub's official trending page excludes repos younger than 60 days (see repo notes), so its absence there doesn't mean anything.
  • Ships often: 9-22 through 10-31 saw 27 releases (v0.1.0 → v0.10.1), plus a 373 MB instrument sample pack sounds-v1 (10-04). Last commit 11-05.
  • The cause of the 11-04 spike is not found. Over the same period there's TikTok @clone.creatives (11-05, "Claude Code can draw now ✏️ anidoodle") and a few tutorial videos, but view counts are tiny.

2. Competitors: who else is doing the same thing

"Let a coding agent animate / make videos with code" sprouted hundreds of skill libraries within a month of Opus 5.5 launching (zhuyansen/awesome-claude-video-skills lists 180 of them). The table below shows the closest ones from our GitHub database (2026-11-06 data):

NameWhereLaunchedScaleHow it differs from anidoodle
lemomo-ai/lemo-opuscarOpen source2026-09-2612,613★, +3,233 over 7 daysBuilt around "66 film styles," a style library where each style gets a short film. More of a "cinematic style template"; anidoodle leans toward hand-drawn art, the drawing process, and music composition.
Vincentwei1021/video-shotcraftOpen source2026-07-1917,238★Built on Remotion for product promo videos (124 shot recipes). A commercial promo angle, not hand-drawn.
alchaincyf/huashu-art-motion (Huashu)open source (Chinese)2026-10-066,370★"35/36 art styles + 9 narration grammars." Almost the same positioning, launched two weeks later, popular with Chinese-language creators. The README acknowledgments don't mention anidoodle.
remotion-dev/skillsOpen source (official)2026-01-196,409★Remotion's official skill. A React video framework that doesn't care about visual style.
geeklee/srt-whiteboard-animationopen source (Chinese)2026-07-275,400★Only turns subtitles into whiteboard hand-drawn animation. A single use case.
cth9191/animateOpen source2026-10-041,562★, +488 over 7 daysAlso a single canvas, deterministic, procedural animation, with 7 art styles plus matching reference images. Lighter, and growing faster than anidoodle right now.
Tejashmakwana/motionmaxxingOpen source2026-10-061,378★Reworks "AI-looking" videos to look like motion designers made them. Leans toward motion graphics.
iart-ai/motion-skills, iart-ai/javascript-animation-skillsOpen source2026-06 / 09-231,233★ / 51★A collection of 50 motion skills; the latter is literally called "Opus 5.5-style frame-by-frame JS animation."
buildwithhanif/claude-animation-skillOpen source2026-09-23130★"Hand-drawn 2D animation, written as code." Nearly the same tagline. Node canvas, no browser needed.
hand-drawn-canvas-animation(Alexey Fateev / alesha-pro)Open source2026-09Not verifiedA small, focused hand-drawn canvas skill. Someone forked it into anzal1/hand-drawn-film, and thesatyajit compared it against anidoodle.
HyperFrames (HeyGen, promoted by midudev)Open source2026Promo video with 2.8k likesMakes video with HTML/CSS/JS, with a built-in editor. A general-purpose video framework.
Anthropic's official anthropics/skills (algorithmic-art, canvas-design, etc.)Big-company features2025OfficialGenerative art and single posters. Doesn't show the drawing process or make scored short films.
AI image and video generation (Midjourney, Sora, Veo, etc.)big tech—HugeDiffusion models: not reproducible, and characters are hard to keep consistent. anidoodle's whole selling point is "no generative model."

Bottom line: competitors are everywhere, and some are an order of magnitude bigger (lemo-opuscar, video-shotcraft). anidoodle isn't the biggest in this category. It's one of the earliest and most complete in the English-language "hand-drawn style" niche.

3. Where users came from (growth tactics)

  1. Rode the Opus 5.5 launch wave (confirmed). Opus 5.5 launched on 2026-09-22 (Anthropic's site; launch-date coverage from emergent.sh and cellcog.ai). Within a week, posts about "Opus 5.5 animating with JavaScript frame by frame" flooded feeds, including a Western civilization history animation with 5.8M views (explainx.ai 2026-10-03). anidoodle was built the same day the model launched. The author teased it on X that day: "Anidoodle skill. Coming soon to a GitHub near you ;)" (x.com/alexgreensh/status/2102355943891607963). A r/ClaudeAI post, "Opus 5.5 creates a train journey drawn entirely in JavaScript" (9-22), included the repo link.
  2. Piggybacked replies on a viral post (confirmed). Addy Osmani 9-24 posted "Claude Opus 5.5 drew each frame of this animation in JavaScript. Here's 'how browsers work' in 40 seconds." The author replied underneath: "Beautiful! If anyone is looking for a skill to help do stuff like that, I just open sourced Anidoodle" (Brave search excerpt, x.com/addyosmani/status/2103009037164110327). Stars grew by +112 that day, then +88 to +197 per day for the next three days.
  3. Named in a roundup post (confirmed). Eric Buess 9-24 wrote in a roundup of Opus 5.5 work: "If you'd like to try this yourself, @alexgreensh open-sourced Anidoodle…" (x.com/EricBuess/status/2103226548413182366). The AGI Hunt 10-07 daily digest and The Daily Commit 9-28 also featured it.
  4. The author keeps posting work (confirmed). Includes a tutorial on "how to draw an owl" (about 115 likes on X), a 77-second launch clip (about 69 likes), an October Clawd Halloween short (x.com/alexgreensh/status/2110404428691808308), and a long LinkedIn post 9-28. The author's own X engagement is modest; the work is raw material for others to share.
  5. The author's existing developer reputation (confirmed). The same author's token-optimizer (2,907★), attention-span (1,535★), and repo-forensics (205★) are all known in the Claude Code tooling crowd. GitHub followers: 297. Their day job is cofounder of 10x Company, an AI consultancy for GTM teams, and they also run the 2000-person 10x Marketers community (LinkedIn; 10xplaybooks.com).
  6. Auto-listed by skill directories (confirmed). More than a dozen sites have pages for it, including skillsllm, claudemarketplaces, flowy, skillsmp, onei, verified-skill, claudepluginhub, skillmart, plugandship, motionsites, and claudevideo.org (tagged "NEW SINCE OPUS 5.5"). They also offer one-line installs via npx skills add and /plugin marketplace add.
  7. Third-party tutorial accounts promoting it (confirmed, but small reach). Josh Pocock (StrideOps / Stride AI Academy) 10-02 posted about anidoodle on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and LinkedIn. His copy used "comment for the tutorial" (comment-to-DM) to funnel people to his own course. Aashish Pahwa runs an Instagram and tutorial page, Manav Mishra posted on Threads, there are French and Russian YouTube walkthroughs, and thesatyajit.com 11-01 published a long breakdown. TikTok view counts are small (866 views on Josh's post, 84 on clone.creatives). These creators use it as content bait, and it gets exposure through them.
  8. Multilingual README (confirmed): English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, French, and Spanish. That fits the Chinese- and Japanese-speaking "Opus video" wave, and the Trendshift page has a Chinese description.
  9. No paid promotion found: no ads, no Product Hunt or Hacker News launch (Algolia search turns up no relevant threads).

4. Why it took off

  • Timing: the repo was created the same day Opus 5.5 launched, and Opus 5.5's signature viral trick was "animating with code." Demand was educated by millions of views within a week, and everyone was asking "how was this made?" A ready-made skill caught that demand.
  • Riding others' momentum: the biggest surge (9-24 to 9-28, about 620 stars, nearly half the current total) came from the Addy Osmani reply thread and the Eric Buess mention in the same period, not from its own posts.
  • The output is the ad: every art style comes with a time-lapse GIF of the piece being drawn. The top of the README shows a 77-second launch video, with every frame and sound generated by the tool. You can see what it does in a glance, and it's easy to share and for tutorial creators to reuse.
  • Complete enough to earn stars and forks: 32 art styles, 21 music styles with code-generated scores, sound effects, interactive web mascots, launch video templates, drawing lessons, character consistency, and 3D (three.js). skillmart rated it 9/10, with the comment "An unusually complete skill." Fork rate is about 9.6%.
  • The author's track record: two libraries with over a thousand stars each in the Claude Code tooling scene, so people were ready to trust it and follow from the start.
  • Steady updates: 6 releases every 27 weeks, and each update earns another appearance on directory sites and X.

5. Differentiation

How anidoodle differs from its peers:

  1. Code only, reproducible: randomness comes only from rng(seed), each frame is a pure function, and a per-frame hash verification tool is included (thesatyajit confirmed this by reading the source). Peers mostly also claim to be "deterministic," but only this one puts "identical output on every render" in its tagline and README badges.
  2. The drawing process is the output: each style generates a time-lapse in the order a real medium is painted (watercolor starts with pencil, then layers from light to dark; woodcut carves the key block first, then adds color blocks). The final frame matches the still pixel for pixel. Peers mostly make "pictures that move"; this makes "pictures being drawn."
  3. Built-in composition engine and sample instrument pack, plus a tool that checks whether a melody is too close to a known tune.
  4. The review process is written into the skill: the user first approves a tone-setting still frame, then the full video is generated, then a fresh sub-agent looks for flaws, and finally it renders.
  5. Wide range of uses: website illustrations, interactive mascots, launch videos (four aspect ratios, subtitles, audio-visual sync checks), and drawing lessons.

Is that why it took off? Partly. Its growth came from timing and riding others' momentum (a batch of libraries that appeared the same week all benefited from this wave, and lemo-opuscar benefited the most). Its differentiation is what made it stand out: among the many "Opus animation" skills, it became the one that gets named when English speakers recommend a "hand-drawn" style, and the one whose showcase is good enough for tutorial creators to keep reusing. But "determinism" and "drawing with code" were quickly matched by peers (cth9191/animate, buildwithhanif, and huashu-art-motion all have them), so its remaining moat is completeness and output quality, not the idea.

6. How many people know it / has anyone copied it

  • Visibility: it's circulating in small circles. It has some name recognition in the Claude Code skills community and the "Opus 5.5 video" conversation (Addy Osmani's reply thread, Eric Buess's roundup, the AGI Hunt digest, a dozen skill directories, and a few tutorial creators). No media coverage, and no Hacker News or Product Hunt launch. It's free and open source, so it brings in no revenue. The author uses it to funnel traffic to their consulting and other tools (Total Recall, Token Optimizer).
  • Copycats: many.
    • alchaincyf/huashu-art-motion, nearly the same positioning, launched two weeks later, now 4.7 times its size (6,370★, created 10-06, "35 art styles"). It has also been forked into Tliens/kuige-art-motion and Chidober/tuned-art-motion.
    • Repos with nearly identical taglines: buildwithhanif/claude-animation-skill (9-23), iart-ai/javascript-animation-skills (9-23), DevRowe/hand-sketch, and feitangyuan/doodle-anim.
    • Forked and renamed, then re-published directly: MaTriXy/anidoodle, kiangasgaryishere/Anidoodle-Studio, motdang/anidoodle-motdang; plus a deploy tutorial repo, JUTZUGC/anidoodle-deploy-guide.
    • Re-posting its demo videos on their own sites: skill directories like skilloop and others.

7. What to borrow

  • Ship tooling the day a big model launches: when a new model drops, everyone shares one 'wow' use case, and whoever first packages it as an installable skill gets the most traffic. anidoodle built its library on launch day (the author had been working on it and just timed the release).
  • Reply under the viral post with 'I just open-sourced a tool that does this': nearly free, and it reaches far more people than posting on your own.
  • Let the works in the README be the ads: make launch videos and a GIF for each feature with your own tool, and tutorial accounts will spread them further.
  • One-line install across multiple channels + multilingual README, so skill directories pick it up automatically.
  • Frequent releases to keep exposure in directories and feeds.

8. Still unclear

  • Where the spikes around 11-04 / 11-05 came from is unknown (possibly TikTok tutorials or X reposts; not verified).
  • Exact engagement on Addy Osmani's original post and the author's reply (X requires login; only search excerpts were retrieved).
  • The Reddit posts (r/ClaudeAI 9-22, r/ClaudeCode '35 art styles'): authors and upvotes unverified, since Reddit blocked scraping. The latter's '35 styles' may refer to huashu-art-motion rather than anidoodle.
  • Actual install and usage numbers: directory click data is incomplete, and stars are not usage.
  • Whether huashu-art-motion drew on anidoodle: timing and positioning overlap heavily, but its README never mentions anidoodle, so copying can't be confirmed.

Sources

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.