Boneyard: Generate pixel-perfect skeleton screens from your real DOM | Hacker News Reader

Boneyard: Generate pixel-perfect skeleton screens from your real DOM

github.com

31 pointssteveharing118 comments

No examples, no mention of why someone would want this, site is broken on mobile.

But it has animated logo (that you have to click on to start) and chart of GitHub stars progression in time!

Hm... A Twitter comment is not documentation, but:

> every skeleton screen you've ever hand-coded is a waste of time

> you're literally measuring padding and guessing widths to build a worse version of a layout that already exists in your DOM

> so I made a package that just reads the real one

Linked from the readme.

I've never personally seen a skeleton screen. I don't know why anyone would need this, and struggling to think of what problems are solved by them.

You may have seen.

https://i.postimg.cc/qqCYtL6V/Screenshot-2026-04-08-134800.j...

The pic above is representation of skeleton screen on youtube.com when opened in browser

Placeholder with same dimension or colors as actual content, which will get replaced it keep user engaged rather having a blank screen that suddenly fills or spinners.

Ahhh okay, have never seen it called that before. Thanks!

Thanks, I had not heard this term before.

Been working on websites on and off since 1999

Am I understanding this right - in order to make ‘accurate’ placeholder content, it preloads the actual content, then uses that to guide the appearance of the placeholder content, that it shows while you’re waiting for your actual content to load…

Was this an April fools joke?

You're close. it loads the actual content while you're developing your app to create skeletons. In production it then uses the data gathered in development.

It's a clever trick.

This is cool but I'm confused - it says it generates the bones at "build time" not at "runtime." But you're calling this headless bone generator while your app is running, right? That sounds like runtime.

I have no idea what this means, and I don't think I'm alone. Make a video dammit.

Seems interesting, but I wonder how this would be better than just asking an LLM to implement the skeletons?

For most components, current generation models should be able to understand the component code and produce skeletons that occupies exactly the same space

I do this often, and they do! Yours is the same question I had.

Their doc linked at the bottom actually has a pretty nice example.

https://boneyard.vercel.app/how-it-works

Appreciate this! For anyone looking for examples of skeletons it generates, you can visit their doc

I don't like skeletons that much but it's really creative to have the headless browser inspect your running dev env and capture element size & placement snapshots.

I love seeing things that support Svelte.

I was going to say it seems potentially useful, but engagement stats for this on Github and X seem unnatural and the anon crypto author makes it a hard no for me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com