gsap-skills: official GSAP skills for Claude, Cursor and Codex

The problem gsap-skills targets: agents that write plausible but wrong GSAP

GSAP has a small core API and a large surface around it. Timelines, the position parameter, ScrollTrigger's refresh lifecycle, plugin registration, and framework cleanup each have rules that are easy to state and easy to get subtly wrong. A general-purpose agent trained on mixed blog posts tends to produce code that runs, animates something, and then leaks a ScrollTrigger instance or selects the wrong element inside a React component. The repository says its purpose plainly: these skills "teach agents correct GSAP usage: core API, timelines, ScrollTrigger, plugins, React/Vue/Svelte, vanilla JS and performance."

The audience is narrow and specific. This is for teams whose coding agent already writes JavaScript animation and who want the output to follow GreenSock's own conventions rather than a random tutorial's. It is not a runtime dependency. Nothing here ships to your users. The deliverable is markdown that your agent reads before it writes code, which means the value shows up as fewer corrections after generation, not as a feature in your app.

What is actually in the repository: eight skills and a per-agent config layer

The repository is a skills bundle, not a library. The skills/ directory holds one folder per skill, each with a SKILL.md file: gsap-core, gsap-timeline, gsap-scrolltrigger, gsap-plugins, gsap-utils, gsap-react, gsap-performance and gsap-frameworks. A skills/llms.txt file serves as the skill index.

Around that core sit the integration files that make the same content usable in different agents: .claude-plugin/ and .cursor-plugin/ each carry plugin.json and marketplace.json, and .github/ holds copilot-instructions.md plus path-specific instructions under .github/instructions/ for react and scrolltrigger. AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md and GEMINI.md sit at the top level as agent-facing guidance. There is also an examples/ directory with react/, vue/, nuxt/ and vanilla/ subfolders.

That layout tells you how the project expects to be consumed. The SKILL.md files are the payload; the plugin and instruction files are adapters so each agent finds the payload in the place it already looks. If you are evaluating whether this will help, the SKILL.md files are what to read, not the README.

Installing gsap-skills and generating your first tween with an agent

The README recommends the skills CLI, which it says works with Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Windsurf, Copilot, Google Antigravity and 40+ agents. Run this from your project:

npx skills add https://github.com/greensock/gsap-skills

The CLI auto-detects the installed agent. If detection picks the wrong one, the README shows an explicit target flag:

npx skills add https://github.com/greensock/gsap-skills --agent antigravity

Claude Code users have a second path through the plugin marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add greensock/gsap-skills

Cursor users can instead go to Settings, then Rules, then Add Rule, then Remote Rule (Github), and enter greensock/gsap-skills. The manual route is to clone the repository and copy the skill folders into your agent's skill directory. The README lists the paths, including ~/.claude/skills/ for Claude Code, ~/.cursor/skills/ for Cursor, ~/.codex/skills/ for OpenAI Codex, and ~/.config/opencode/skills/ for OpenCode.

After installing, ask your agent for something ordinary, such as a timeline that staggers three elements and pauses on hover. What you should see is the pattern the README calls canonical: imports from gsap and gsap/ScrollTrigger, a gsap.registerPlugin call, transform aliases like x instead of left, and autoAlpha rather than opacity alone. If the agent still writes chained setTimeout calls, the skill was not loaded, and the fix is the installation path, not the prompt.

The free-plugin claim is the most consequential line in the README

The README states that GSAP is "100% free, including every plugin," and that following Webflow's acquisition of GSAP, formerly Club GSAP plugins such as SplitText and MorphSVG are free for everyone including commercial use. It goes further: install everything from the public gsap npm package, with no Club membership, no .npmrc, no auth token and no private registry.

If that holds for your version, it removes the single most common reason teams avoided the plugin set. Historically the practical question was not whether SplitText solved the problem but whether the licence covered the deployment. The repository's answer is that it now does. The licence file in the repository is MIT, which covers the skills themselves; the plugin licensing statement is about GSAP, a separate package, and the README is the source for it. Verify against the current GSAP licence before you plan a commercial release around it, because this is the kind of claim that matters more than any code sample here.

Where gsap-skills will not help, and two cases where it is the wrong tool

The first limit is structural. Skills are read by an agent at generation time. They do not lint your code, run in CI, or catch a bad tween at runtime. If your team does not use an agent that reads skill directories, installing this changes nothing at all. The README's manual table lists six agents with documented paths; anything outside that set depends on whether the tool happens to scan a compatible folder.

The second limit is that the content is prose. A SKILL.md file describing correct ScrollTrigger cleanup cannot know that your layout shifts after a font loads, which is exactly when ScrollTrigger.refresh() is needed. The gsap-scrolltrigger skill covers refresh and cleanup, but no skill can detect that your specific page changed height. Expect to keep that discipline yourself.

The third case is a mismatch of subject. If you are not using GSAP, this repository has nothing for you. And if your project is a static marketing page with one fade-in, the setup cost of installing a skills bundle and confirming your agent picked it up exceeds the benefit of hand-writing four lines of CSS.

gsap-skills against a plain rules file or a general documentation MCP

The obvious alternative is a hand-written rules file in your repository, the same mechanism the project itself uses for Copilot through .github/copilot-instructions.md. The difference in approach is ownership and scope. A rules file is yours: you write the twenty lines your codebase actually needs, and it stays correct until you change your conventions. gsap-skills is maintained upstream, covers eight topic areas plus framework variants, and updates when GreenSock updates its guidance. You trade control for coverage.

A second alternative is pointing your agent at GSAP's documentation directly, through a documentation server or by pasting links. That gives the agent the full API reference rather than a curated subset. The trade-off runs the other way: raw docs describe every option, while the skills describe the ones GreenSock wants agents to reach for, such as preferring transform aliases and autoAlpha. For an agent that already retrieves documentation well, the skills add opinion rather than facts.

The practical split is this. Use a local rules file when your animation code follows house conventions that no upstream project knows about. Use gsap-skills when you want the upstream opinion on how GSAP should be written, and you are willing to re-pull it when it changes.

Maintenance, upgrade cost and the MIT licence boundary

The repository is not archived. Its last push was on 2026-07-29, which puts it within the recent window, though there are no published GitHub releases for it, so versioning happens on the main branch rather than through tagged artifacts. That matters for upgrades: there is no changelog entry to read before you pull. The realistic upgrade path is to re-run the install command or re-copy the skills/ folder, then diff the SKILL.md files you rely on. If your agent's output changes after an update, the diff is where to look.

The cost is low but not zero. Skills are plain markdown, so they consume context when loaded. Eight skills indexed in llms.txt are meant to be selected rather than all loaded at once, but a poorly configured agent may pull more than it needs. Watch for that if you work in a long session.

On licensing, the repository carries MIT, which permits use, modification and redistribution with the licence text retained. The README's statements about GSAP and its plugins are about a different package with its own terms, and the README is the only source here for those. Treat the two separately when you document your own dependency chain.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt gsap-skills if your agent already writes GSAP and you want it to stop guessing at plugin registration, cleanup and ScrollTrigger refresh. Skip it if you do not use GSAP or your agent cannot read a skills directory. Before trusting it, open skills/gsap-scrolltrigger/SKILL.md and skills/gsap-react/SKILL.md and check that the patterns match your framework version, then run npx skills add https://github.com/greensock/gsap-skills and confirm the CLI detected the agent you actually use.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. greensock/gsap-skills on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: MIT
4. README