ponytail-gain

ponytail-gain is a skill for Claude Code from DietrichGebert/ponytail. It costs 34 tokens per session (456 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A one-time scoreboard showing published benchmark medians for Ponytail across five everyday coding tasks and three models. A benchmark is a repeatable test used to compare approaches.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to display the benchmark comparison and links to the related shortcut-debt and repository-audit reports.
Why use it?
It gives context for the reported differences in code size, cost, and speed without pretending those figures came from the current repository.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the ponytail plugin — 7 skills, 6 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to display the benchmark comparison and links to the related shortcut-debt and repository-audit reports.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/dietrichgebert/ponytail/ponytail-gain
About the project

Ponytail is a set of instructions and extensions that guides AI coding agents toward smaller, simpler code changes while retaining safety checks. It is intended for developers using agents such as Claude Code, and the catalogue entries are its skills, instructions, plugin, and rule.

DietrichGebert/ponytail · 134,118 stars · on GitHub · ponytail.dev

Install

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.

Any agent
npx skills add DietrichGebert/ponytail --skill ponytail-gain
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ponytail, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 6 commands.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for ponytail-gain

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dietrichgebert/ponytail/ponytail-gain/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/dietrichgebert/ponytail/ponytail-gain)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dietrichgebert/ponytail/ponytail-gain"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dietrichgebert/ponytail/ponytail-gain/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for ponytail-gain

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dietrichgebert/ponytail/ponytail-gain"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dietrichgebert/ponytail/ponytail-gain.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 456 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 18 Jun 2026
  • Snyk pass 18 Jun 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00034 $0.00456
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00228
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00091
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00046

Measured 11d ago against content hash 6268baa13052, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ponytail-gain 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

.openclaw/skills/ponytail-gain/SKILL.md · 48 lines

What it actually says

Ponytail Gain

Display this scoreboard when invoked. One-shot: do NOT change mode, write flag files, or persist anything.

The figures are the published benchmark medians (5 everyday tasks: email validator, debounce, CSV sum, countdown timer, rate limiter; three models: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus). They are measured, not computed from the current repo. Source: benchmarks/ and the README.

Scoreboard

Render plain ASCII bars. The bar length shows the measured range; the label carries the exact figure:

  ponytail gain                     benchmark median · 5 tasks · 3 models

  Lines of code   no-skill  ████████████████████  100%
                  ponytail  ██▌·················    6–20%   ▼ 80–94%
  Cost            no-skill  ████████████████████  100%
                  ponytail  █████▌··············   23–53%  ▼ 47–77%
  Speed           ponytail  ▸ 3–6× faster

  This repo:  /ponytail-debt  (shortcuts you deferred)
              /ponytail-audit (what's still cuttable)

Honesty boundary

These are benchmark medians, not this repo. NEVER print a per-repo savings number ("you saved X lines/tokens here"): the unbuilt version was never written, so there is no real baseline to subtract from in a live repo. The only real per-repo figures come from /ponytail-debt (a counted ledger), and this card points there instead of inventing one.

Boundaries

One-shot display. Edits nothing, changes no mode. "stop ponytail" or "normal mode": revert.

Changes

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.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 48 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 6268baa13052

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ponytail-gain is a skill published in the GitHub repository DietrichGebert/ponytail (134,118 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 456 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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