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 agentmods add skills/porchetthub/-https-github.com-dietrichgebert-ponytail/ponytail-debtnpx skills add porchetthub/-https-github.com-DietrichGebert-ponytail --skill ponytail-debtgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/porchetthub/-https-github.com-DietrichGebert-ponytailWrote 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/porchetthub/-https-github.com-dietrichgebert-ponytail/ponytail-debt)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/porchetthub/-https-github.com-dietrichgebert-ponytail/ponytail-debt"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/porchetthub/-https-github.com-dietrichgebert-ponytail/ponytail-debt.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 | $0.00031 | $0.00384 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00015 | $0.00192 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00006 | $0.00077 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00038 |
Grade A, and why
ponytail-debt 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 4d 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.
This is a copy
100% identical to ponytail-debt — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.
What it actually says
Every deliberate ponytail shortcut is marked with a ponytail: comment naming
its ceiling and upgrade path. This collects them into one ledger so a deferral
can't quietly become permanent.
Scan
Grep the repo for comment markers, skipping node_modules, .git, and build
output:
grep -rnE '(#|//) ?ponytail:' . (add other comment prefixes if your stack uses them)
Each hit is one ledger row. The comment prefix keeps prose that merely mentions the convention out of the ledger.
Output
One row per marker, grouped by file:
<file>:<line>, <what was simplified>. ceiling: <the limit named>. upgrade: <the trigger to revisit>.
The convention is ponytail: <ceiling>, <upgrade path>, so pull the ceiling
and the trigger straight from the comment. Want an owner per row too? add
git blame -L<line>,<line>.
Flag the rot risk: any ponytail: comment that names no upgrade path or
trigger gets a no-trigger tag, those are the ones that silently rot.
End with <N> markers, <M> with no trigger. Nothing found: No ponytail: debt. Clean ledger.
Boundaries
Reads and reports only, changes nothing. To persist it, ask and it writes the
ledger to a file (e.g. PONYTAIL-DEBT.md). One-shot. "stop ponytail-debt" or
"normal mode" to revert.
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.
- 4d ago First seen · 42 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A b0281c1d96fa
ponytail-debt is a skill published in the GitHub repository porchetthub/-https-github.com-DietrichGebert-ponytail (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 384 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to ponytail-debt, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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