Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to claude-code-expert/carve-harness. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/claude-code-expert/carve-harness/main/.claude/commands/ponytail-help.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/claude-code-expert/carve-harnessWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/commands/claude-code-expert/carve-harness/ponytail-help)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/claude-code-expert/carve-harness/ponytail-help"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/claude-code-expert/carve-harness/ponytail-help.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00011 | $0.00282 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00005 | $0.00141 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00002 | $0.00056 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00001 | $0.00028 |
Grade A, and why
ponytail-help scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
What it actually says
Show the ponytail quick reference. One shot, change nothing: do not switch mode, write flag files, or persist anything. Levels: /ponytail lite (build what's asked, name the lazier alternative in one line), /ponytail (full, the default ladder: YAGNI then stdlib then native then one line then minimum), /ponytail ultra (deletion before addition, challenges the requirement before building). Commands: /ponytail-review (over-engineering review of the current changes), /ponytail-audit (whole-repo over-engineering audit), /ponytail-debt (harvest ponytail: comments into a tracked ledger), /ponytail-gain (measured-impact scoreboard from the benchmark), /ponytail-help (this card). Deactivate with 'stop ponytail', 'normal mode', or /ponytail off; resume anytime with /ponytail. Default mode is full; change it with the PONYTAIL_DEFAULT_MODE environment variable (off|lite|full|ultra) or a config file at ~/.config/ponytail/config.json (Windows: %APPDATA%\ponytail\config.json) with {"defaultMode": "lite"}. Resolution order: env var, then config file, then full.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 6d ago First seen · 6 lines · 11 tokens per session scan A dc17cb7fae36
ponytail-help is a command published in the GitHub repository claude-code-expert/carve-harness (11 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 11 tokens to every session and 282 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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