Building skeleton loaders is a chore. You design a component, write a matching skeleton state, and six weeks later when the layout changes, you have to remember to update the skeleton too. You end up maintaining two parallel versions of the same UI for every feature. Instead of writing another loader by hand, I set out to see if the process could be automated by inspecting the rendered UI directly in the browser to synthesize a clean skeleton placeholder.

This talk is the story of going down that technical rabbit hole. What started as a simple automation attempt quickly turned into a series of unexpected browser and DOM challenges.

Making this work meant wrestling with the rendered layout tree to strip out structural wrappers and zero-height containers without breaking the visual hierarchy. It required solving layout edge cases around measuring text nodes, dynamic images, and form elements, alongside figuring out how to allow developer customization without re-creating the exact maintenance burden I was trying to avoid. This talk details those friction points, the trade-offs involved, and what happened when a minor UI annoyance turned into a deep engineering experiment in DOM inspection.