Ponytail: make your agent the laziest senior dev in the room

Agents love to overbuild. Ask for a date field and you get a custom picker, a config file and a helper nobody asked for. Ponytail is a skill that pushes back: before writing anything, the agent checks whether the code needs to exist, whether the repo already has it, and whether the platform or standard library already does it.

Lazy means efficient, not careless. It never cuts validation, error handling, security or accessibility.

The commands

• /ponytail lite | full | ultra | off sets how hard it pushes.

• /ponytail-review reviews your current diff for bugs, security, missing tests and what to cut.

• /ponytail-audit does the same for the whole repo, ranked.

• /ponytail-debt collects the deliberate shortcuts it marked in comments into one list.

Install

In Claude Code, run these as two prompts:

/plugin marketplace add DietrichGebert/ponytail
/plugin install ponytail@ponytail

For Codex: codex plugin marketplace add DietrichGebert/ponytail then codex plugin add ponytail@ponytail. It also works with OpenCode, Gemini, Pi and others, and through rules files in Cursor.

Does it work?

The author's benchmark across 39 tasks reports 53% less code and 45% fewer tokens than the same agent without it. Your numbers will differ, but on Agent Usage you can see it in your own token chart. Try it for a week and compare.