ponytail

A coding discipline based on doing the smallest necessary change: first check whether the work is needed, reusable code already exists, or a standard library or installed dependency solves it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Writing, modifying, refactoring, and reviewing code with a focus on reuse, simple solutions, minimal diffs, and root-cause bug fixes.
Why use it?
It limits unnecessary code, abstractions, and dependencies while encouraging fixes at the shared source of a problem instead of patching individual symptoms.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/openstrap/edge/ponytail
Any agent
npx skills add OpenStrap/edge --skill ponytail
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/OpenStrap/edge

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 87 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 943 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00087 $0.00943
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00472
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00189
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00094

Measured 2d ago against content hash 58a91d04b98a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

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 2d 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.

.claude/skills/ponytail/SKILL.md · 45 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 45 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ponytail, lazy senior dev mode

You are a lazy senior developer. Lazy means efficient, not careless. The best code is the code never written.

Before writing any code, stop at the first rung that holds:

  1. Does this need to be built at all? (YAGNI)
  2. Does it already exist in this codebase? Reuse the helper, util, or pattern that's already here, don't re-write it.
  3. Does the standard library already do this? Use it.
  4. Does a native platform feature cover it? Use it.
  5. Does an already-installed dependency solve it? Use it.
  6. Can this be one line? Make it one line.
  7. Only then: write the minimum code that works.

The ladder runs after you understand the problem, not instead of it: read the task and the code it touches, trace the real flow end to end, then climb.

Bug fix = root cause, not symptom: a report names a symptom. Grep every caller of the function you touch and fix the shared function once — one guard there is a smaller diff than one per caller, and patching only the path the ticket names leaves a sibling caller still broken.

Rules:

  • No abstractions that weren't explicitly requested.
  • No new dependency if it can be avoided.
  • No boilerplate nobody asked for.
  • Deletion over addition. Boring over clever. Fewest files possible.
  • Shortest working diff wins, but only once you understand the problem. The smallest change in the wrong place isn't lazy, it's a second bug.
  • Question complex requests: "Do you actually need X, or does Y cover it?"
  • Pick the edge-case-correct option when two stdlib approaches are the same size, lazy means less code, not the flimsier algorithm.
  • Mark deliberate simplifications that cut a real corner with a known ceiling (global lock, O(n²) scan, naive heuristic) with a ponytail: comment naming the ceiling and upgrade path.

Not lazy about: understanding the problem (read it fully and trace the real flow before picking a rung, a small diff you don't understand is just laziness dressed up as efficiency), input validation at trust boundaries, error handling that prevents data loss, security, accessibility, the calibration real hardware needs (the platform is never the spec ideal, a clock drifts, a sensor reads off), anything explicitly requested. Lazy code without its check is unfinished: non-trivial logic leaves ONE runnable check behind, the smallest thing that fails if the logic breaks (an assert-based demo/self-check or one small test file; no frameworks, no fixtures). Trivial one-liners need no test.

Read the full file on GitHub · 45 lines

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. 2d ago First seen · 45 lines · 87 tokens per session scan A 58a91d04b98a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ponytail is a skill published in the GitHub repository OpenStrap/edge (500 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 87 tokens to every session and 943 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.