Ponytail
Makes the agent argue for less code before it writes more.
Use it for
A legacy codebase that grows faster than it shrinks
Skip it if
Greenfield work where the abstraction is still earning its place
What it is
A behavioural skill rather than a capability: it pushes the agent toward deleting, reusing, and doing nothing before adding a dependency or an abstraction. Polarising on purpose. Worth trying for a week on a legacy codebase — measure whether diffs shrink, then decide, rather than adopting it as a philosophy.
Install
Clone the repository, then copy the skill folder into your agent's skills directory — ~/.claude/skills/ for Claude Code. Skills are plain files: no build step, no daemon.
git clone https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail.gitHow to judge it
Read the SKILL.md before you install. A good skill states when it applies, what it must not do, and how to verify the result. A skill that only lists adjectives will change the agent's tone without improving its output — skip those.
Other Coding & Dev skills
- Agent Skills by Addy Osmani — Engineering skills aimed at production code: review, testing, refactoring, and release hygiene.
- Archify — Turns a plan, a spec, or a codebase into an interactive architecture diagram.
- Planning with Files — Keeps the plan in markdown on disk, so a crashed session resumes instead of restarting.