A skeleton-screen library launched on Halloween: Skullet got over 700 stars in a week, powered by the author's 13k followers, not a new idea

Skullet is an "automatic skeleton screen" front-end library: you wrap your component, it measures what the content looks like, and it draws a loading placeholder of the same shape. The idea was already a hit half a year ago (boneyard, 7,600 stars). Skullet got 773 stars thanks to the author's circle on X, a polished demo video, and the Halloween timing. The playbook can be learned, but three people already hold this lane, and you probably don't have his 13k followers.

The Oct 31 tweet

On Oct 2026, 31 at 1:17 PM UTC, front-end engineer Lochie Axon posted this on X:

Introducing Skullet 💀 Loading states without hand-drawn placeholders or layout shift. Skullet measures your components and draws their skeletons for you. Wrap your component with <Skeleton> and you're done. Happy Halloween! 🎃

It came with a demo video. By Nov 6, the tweet had 2,286 likes, 2,631 bookmarks and 162k views. More bookmarks than likes. For a developer tool, that means many people saved it to use later, not just tapped like and moved on.

The name is a joke too: skull plus mullet, and skeleton screens are already called skeletons. The website's demo copy keeps the bit going: "Wait, how does it know the content length? … Spooky … skeletons usually are 💀".

Lochie Axon is front-end lead at Aave Labs, previously built ConnectKit, and had 13,354 followers on X at the time. This wasn't his first time: his two earlier small libraries, web-haptics (2,800 stars) and torph (1,500 stars), used the same playbook of "one interactive landing page + screen recordings on X." Skullet is the third.

What it actually does

Anyone who has built loading states knows skeleton screens are usually handwritten: a grey bar here, a grey block there. When the content changes, the skeleton no longer matches, and the page jumps when the content finally loads.

Skullet works like this:

``jsx <Skeleton data={user} sample={SAMPLE_USER}> {(user) => <Card user={user} />} </Skeleton> ``

While the data isn't there yet, it takes the sample data you provide, lays out the component invisibly, and measures the position and size of each element. Text gets a bar per line, images get a block, and the skeleton sits exactly where the content will go. When the data arrives, it swaps in with no jump.

It supports React, Vue, Svelte and vanilla JS. A second tweet in Nov 2 covered the details: no extra build step, server-rendered content shows without flicker, the skeleton is skipped if data comes back fast, and images fade in. 1,461 likes, 67k views. The site skullet.lochie.me puts the effect into real-looking interfaces such as blog cards, dashboards, notifications, chat and wallet asset lists, which you can switch between freely.

The npm package first shipped in Oct 26, and is only now at 0.0.3.

How the stars grew

Data: daily GitHub star counts (11-01 to 11-06); tweet figures as retrieved by 11-06.

A few things to note:

• No spike. Not on Hacker News, no Reddit threads found, no media coverage. After the two tweets, stars kept climbing steadily by over a hundred a day, all driven by small circles of front-end and "design engineer" people on X.
• Not on trending yet. The repo is under 60 days old, and GitHub trending doesn't pick it up yet. A second wave could come after mid-December.
• npm downloads look high. Starting 11-03, it's been over 30k a day, 110k in the last 7 days. For a package with 773 stars and 0.0.3, that's too many. The author's other two packages show the same pattern (torph 346k a week, web-haptics 526k). It could be pulled in by a big app or a dependency chain, or mirror and CI traffic. Unverified.
• 11 issues and 6 PRs mean people are trying it in real projects. Still early.

Who it's competing with

Data: GitHub, npm download stats (10-30 to 11-05), Hacker News, 11-06.

"Automatically measure the skeleton" was already built by boneyard 2026 3–April, and a string of others followed. Skullet came later, and has less than a tenth of boneyard's stars.

The clearest comparison is phantom-ui: nearly the same technical approach as Skullet, launched 7 months earlier, and it reached 816 stars. Skullet caught up in 6 days. The difference isn't the code. It's whether anyone sees the author's work and how good the demo looks.

Why it made the charts

1. The author brings their own distribution. 13k followers, mostly frontend and design engineers, exactly the people who would use this library. The first two libraries already built trust for him.
2. The demo sells better than the library. An interactive demo across a full page of real UI, plus a screen recording. You get it in one glance.
3. The need doesn't need education. boneyard already proved that "I don't want to hand-write skeletons" is a real need. Skullet only had to say "no build step, just wrap it" to set itself apart from the leader.
4. Timing and naming. Released on Halloween, with skull jokes running through the name, emoji, and copy. Free shareability.
5. Polish. No flicker, no jumping, images fade in. These are the details design engineers are picky about.

The technical differentiation is small. "No build step" is a useful contrast point, but it isn't the main reason the stars came.

If it were you

Verdict: Copy the playbook, but don't build another skeleton screen. "A proven need + a one-sentence difference + a good-looking demo + riding a holiday" can be reused for other frontend tools. But automatic skeletons already have three players: boneyard, phantom-ui, and Skullet. A fourth entrant with no following will most likely end up like phantom-ui.

Who it fits: People who already have a few thousand frontend or design-leaning followers on X, Jike, Juejin, or V2EX; design engineers who care about detail and can build a polished interactive demo page; developers who know an ecosystem that hasn't been served yet (React Native, Flutter, SwiftUI, mini programs).

Who it doesn't fit: Anyone with zero followers hoping good code will earn stars on its own; anyone unwilling to spend half their time on a landing-page demo and screen recordings; anyone aiming to build a big, all-in-one component library.

How to do it: Find a frontend need that a project has proven in the last six months (check its stars and npm downloads). Find its most disliked point (here, "requires a build step"), do only that one thing well, and state it in the first line. Switching ecosystems is the most realistic path: boneyard and Skullet are both web-only, and I haven't seen anyone make "automatic skeletons" work well on Flutter, SwiftUI, or mini programs. Make the landing page an interactive demo, embedded in several real UIs.

How to get users: Post a 20–40 second screen recording on X, with the effect in the first line. Aim for bookmarks, not just likes. Pick a holiday or trend for the launch date and name it accordingly. A day or two later, post a follow-up that explains the details. With no followers, ask someone in the community with an audience to help polish the design and credit them, in exchange for a repost. Also post on Show HN and Reddit's r/reactjs and r/webdev, which Skullet didn't use. Those spots are open.

When to move: If you want to go after skeletons with a different ecosystem, do it while boneyard and Skullet still have momentum, ideally before Skullet hits trending in mid-December. The playbook doesn't expire. The next holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas) work too.

Signs you're reading this wrong: ① A similar library from phantom-ui or a zero-follower author organically passes 1,000 stars within a month. That would mean the author's resources matter less than I think, and there's still room in this niche. ② Skullet's star growth stalls in late November and drops to single digits a day. That would mean this was a wave inside a niche circle, and the demand is smaller than it looks. ③ Skullet adds several thousand stars after reaching trending in December. That would mean the skeleton category can hold more players, and an ecosystem switch has better odds.

Data and sources: github.com/lochie/skullet, its README, and daily star counts (11-01 to 11-06); the skullet.lochie.me landing page (11-06); X posts x.com/lochieaxon/status/2116519949799960590 (10-31) and 2117203756203061713 (11-02); RammCodes' Instagram Reel (11-04); npm download stats (10-30 to 11-05); the GitHub pages for boneyard, phantom-ui, skelter, react-loading-skeleton, and react-content-loader; Hacker News submission records.