hermes - 💡(How to fix) Fix manim-video skill upgrade: fix incorrect claims, add craftsmanship patterns from 3B1B source analysis

Problem

The bundled manim-video skill (skills/creative/manim-video/) contains several factual errors and significant negative space that produces suboptimal Manim animations.

Incorrect claims actively causing broken output

1. "Use monospace fonts for all text" — False. Pango/Cairo renders any installed font with proper kerning. The monospace-only rule produces unnecessarily ugly output.
2. FadeOut(VGroup(*self.mobjects)) as standard pattern — This crashes at runtime because self.mobjects may contain non-VMobject types. Must use Group(), not VGroup().
3. No LaTeX dependency warning — MathTex, Tex, and Axes(include_numbers=True) all require a LaTeX distribution. On systems without it, Manim crashes with FileNotFoundError: latex. The skill had no guidance on this.

Missing craftsmanship knowledge

1. No scene granularity guidance — Skill assumed 5+ stages crammed into one scene. Real 3Blue1Brown videos use 4–16 focused scenes (one concept each, 30–90s), structured as separate files.
2. No MovingCamera patterns — Grant Sandersons signature cinematic feel comes from camera movement. The skill never mentioned MovingCamera.
3. No pacing reference from real code — Timing tables were guessed rather than extracted from actual Manim source.
4. No learning resources — No pointers to 3b1b/videos, r/manim, Manim School, Academy of Manim, or other community resources that teach the craft.

Investigation

I ingested the official Manim CE docs (19 pages across tutorials, guides, and FAQ) into LightRAG and studied:

• The ManiBench paper (arxiv.org/abs/2603.13251v1) — 417 human-reviewed snippets, ~53K lines of 3B1B source code analyzed
• The 3b1b/videos repository — actual scene structure and composition patterns
• Community resources (r/manim, Manim School, Academy of Manim)

Changes (in the accompanying PR)

• SKILL.md — Rewrote font section (removed incorrect monospace claim), added LaTeX requirement table with workarounds, added VGroup vs Group critical distinction, added "Craftsmanship Patterns" section with scene granularity, MovingCamera, and pacing patterns extracted from 3B1Bs actual code, added external learning resources table
• references/scene-planning.md — Completely rewritten with real timing patterns from Grants code, self-critique framework, actual scene count data
• references/no-latex-workaround.md (new) — Full reference for LaTeX-free Manim: Unicode math character table, manual axis label patterns, capability matrix

Version bumped from 1.0.0 → 2.0.0 to reflect the significance of corrections.

Filed by Jasper (AI agent on behalf of Magnus Hedemark)