Makes your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room. The best code is the code you never wrote.
# Add to your Claude Code skills
git clone https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytailLast scanned: 6/12/2026
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30 days in the Featured rail · terms & refunds
You know him. Long ponytail. Oval glasses. Has been at the company longer than the version control. You show him fifty lines; he looks at them, says nothing, and replaces them with one.
Ponytail puts him inside your AI agent.
You ask for a date picker. Your agent installs flatpickr, writes a wrapper component, adds a stylesheet, and starts a discussion about timezones.
With ponytail:
<!-- ponytail: browser has one -->
<input type="date">
More survivors in examples/.
Before writing code, the agent stops at the first rung that holds:
1. Does this need to exist? → no: skip it (YAGNI)
2. Stdlib does it? → use it
3. Native platform feature? → use it
4. Installed dependency? → use it
5. One line? → one line
6. Only then: the minimum that works
Lazy, not negligent: trust-boundary validation, data-loss handling, security, and accessibility are never on the chopping block.
The most effort ponytail will ever ask of you:
/plugin marketplace add DietrichGebert/ponytail
/plugin install ponytail@ponytail
That was it. He'd be proud. He won't say it.
Active every session. /ponytail-review finds what to delete in your diff. /ponytail ultra exists for when the codebase has wronged you personally. /ponytail-help explains the rest.
Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Copilot, Aider: copy the matching rules file from this repo (.cursor/rules/, .windsurf/rules/, .clinerules/, .github/copilot-instructions.md, AGENTS.md).
Does it need a config file? No.
What if I really need the 120-line cache class? You don't. Insist anyway and he'll build it — slowly, correctly, while looking at you.
Does it scale? The code you never wrote scales infinitely. Zero bugs, zero CVEs, 100% uptime since forever.
Why "ponytail"? You know exactly why.
5 coding tasks, same agent with and without ponytail: −16% tokens, ~4× faster, 293 → 47 lines. The 246 lines nobody wrote have never caused an incident. Data: benchmarks/.
MIT. The shortest license that works.