Installing a Senior React Native Engineer into My IDE: A Guide to Agent Skills
The Problem: AI Doesn't Know Your Best Practices
We've all been there. You ask an AI to help optimize a FlatList in React Native, and it gives you advice from 2019. Or you ask it to configure an Android build, and it hallucinates a build.gradle setting that doesn't exist in the current version of Expo.
Recently, both Expo and Callstack released "Agent Skills", modular packages of expertise that you can "install" into your AI agent.
Since switching my primary IDE to Google Antigravity, I've found the perfect workflow: running Claude Code directly in the Antigravity terminal to orchestrate these skills.
1. The "Official" Knowledge: Expo Skills
The Expo team has been pioneering this space. As Evan Bacon shared, they released skills specifically tuned for building, deploying, and upgrading. Because Antigravity handles terminal sessions beautifully, I can inject these skills directly into my Claude Code session.
Installation:
/plugin marketplace add expo/skills
/plugin install expo-deploymentNow, when I ask "How do I deploy this to the App Store?" inside Antigravity, the agent doesn't guess. It pulls the exact, verified steps from the Expo team's skill definition.
2. The "Optimization" Expert: Callstack Best Practices
Building features is one thing; optimizing them is another. Callstack (the pros behind React Native performance) released their "Ultimate Guide to Optimization" as an agent skill.
I use this to audit my code. For example, ensuring my Android release builds are actually optimized with R8 code shrinking, something that is often missed in default templates.
Installation:
/plugin marketplace add callstackincubator/agent-skills
/plugin install react-native-best-practices@callstack-agent-skillsWhy This Matters for Production Apps
For my app, PaceFyndr, performance is critical. I can't afford main-thread drops when a user is tracking a run.
By installing these skills, I essentially have a Principal Engineer looking over my shoulder. If I try to ship a build without proper shrinkResources configuration, the Agent Skill can flag it and provide the fix:
// The agent suggests the correct R8 config automatically
android {
buildTypes {
release {
minifyEnabled true
shrinkResources true
}
}
}This is the future of development: we aren't just prompting AI anymore; we are curating the context and skills it uses to build our software. With Google Antigravity managing the environment and Claude Code holding the knowledge, the friction is almost zero.
