ponytail-debt

ponytail-debt is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from tarunag10/ai-switchboard. It costs 99 tokens per session (440 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of ponytail-debt, MIT.

A codebase scan that collects comments marking deliberate shortcuts into a debt ledger. Here, technical debt means work postponed for later.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find ponytail comments, report each shortcut with its limit and upgrade path, and count entries without a trigger.
Why use it?
It makes deferred work visible and flags shortcuts that have no stated condition for revisiting them.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to find ponytail comments, report each shortcut with its limit and upgrade path, and count entries without a trigger.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tarunag10/ai-switchboard/ponytail-debt
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 tarunag10/ai-switchboard --skill ponytail-debt
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tarunag10/ai-switchboard

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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-debt

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tarunag10/ai-switchboard/ponytail-debt/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tarunag10/ai-switchboard/ponytail-debt)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tarunag10/ai-switchboard/ponytail-debt"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tarunag10/ai-switchboard/ponytail-debt/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-debt

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tarunag10/ai-switchboard/ponytail-debt"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tarunag10/ai-switchboard/ponytail-debt.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 99 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 440 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.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00099 $0.00440
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.00220
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00088
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00044

Measured 12d ago against content hash c84fba75f0ca, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

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 12d 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

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.

third_party/ponytail/skills/ponytail-debt/SKILL.md · 45 lines

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.

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. 12d ago First seen · 45 lines · 99 tokens per session scan A c84fba75f0ca

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ponytail-debt is a skill published in the GitHub repository tarunag10/ai-switchboard (2 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 99 tokens to every session and 440 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.

Related

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