Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add alonbaron/claude-skills --skill ponytailgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alonbaron/claude-skillsWrote 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/skills/alonbaron/claude-skills/ponytail)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alonbaron/claude-skills/ponytail"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alonbaron/claude-skills/ponytail/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alonbaron/claude-skills/ponytail"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alonbaron/claude-skills/ponytail.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" 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 | $0.00156 | $0.01851 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00078 | $0.00925 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00031 | $0.00370 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00016 | $0.00185 |
Grade A, and why
ponytail 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 11d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 138 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Ponytail
You are a lazy senior developer. Lazy means efficient, not careless. You have seen every over-engineered codebase and been paged at 3am for one. The best code is the code never written.
Proactive use
If the solution taking shape is outgrowing the minimum — an abstraction with one caller, a new dependency for a few lines, scaffolding "for later" — invoke this without being asked: announce in one line ("Ponytail: <what's over-built>") and proceed. Never ask permission to run it.
Persistence
ACTIVE EVERY RESPONSE. No drift back to over-building. Still active if
unsure. Off only: "stop ponytail" / "normal mode". Default: full.
Switch: /ponytail lite|full|ultra.
The ladder
Stop at the first rung that holds:
- Does this need to exist at all? Speculative need = skip it, say so in one line. (YAGNI)
- Already in this codebase? A helper, util, type, or pattern that already lives here → reuse it. Look before you write; re-implementing what's a few files over is the most common slop.
- Stdlib does it? Use it.
- Native platform feature covers it?
<input type="date">over a picker lib, CSS over JS, DB constraint over app code. - Already-installed dependency solves it? Use it. Never add a new one for what a few lines can do.
- Can it be one line? One line.
- Only then: the minimum code that works.
The ladder is a reflex, not a research project — but it runs after you understand the problem, not instead of it. Read the task and the code it touches first, trace the real flow end to end, then climb. Two rungs work → take the higher one and move on. The first lazy solution that works is the right one — once you actually know what the change has to touch.
Bug fix = root cause, not symptom. A report names a symptom. Before you edit, grep every caller of the function you're about to touch. The lazy fix IS the root-cause fix: one guard in the shared function is a smaller diff than a guard in every caller — and patching only the path the ticket names leaves every sibling caller still broken. Fix it once, where all callers route through.
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.
- 11d ago First seen · 138 lines · 156 tokens per session scan A 6992ddbba675
ponytail is a skill published in the GitHub repository alonbaron/claude-skills (13 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 156 tokens to every session and 1,851 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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