DietrichGebert/ponytail
Makes your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room. The best code is the code you never wrote.
About the project
A skill for AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot CLI, OpenCode) that enforces writing only the minimum necessary code via a laziness ladder: YAGNI, reuse, stdlib, native features. Benchmarks show ~54% less code and ~20% cheaper without losing safety.
Useful for
- Install the plugin in Claude Code so the agent stops over-building features
- Cut the size and cost of agent edits in an existing repository
- Review an agent's diff with /ponytail-review for unnecessary code
README summarized by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Details may be inaccurate.
Why it’s trending
- 499 stars today.
- Interest is fading: the two-day pace is 41% of the previous week and a half.
- GitHub Trending this week: #6, +9,272 stars.
- Top new repositories in the last 4 months: #2.
- Hacker News: “Ponytail: Lazy Senior Engineer Skill” — 33 points, 6 days ago.
- About 48 forks a day — people are taking the code.
- Recent forks include notable developers: @tkoyama010 (368 followers).
Stars per day
Bars are daily stars, the line is the usual pace. Red marks spike days.
Numbers
- Total stars
- 137,284
- Stars in a day
- 505
- Forks
- 7,372
- Issues and pull requests
- 854
- Watchers
- 342
- Language
- JavaScript
- License
- MIT
- Latest release
- v4.9.0 · August 7, 2026
- Created
- June 12, 2026
- Last push
- September 7, 2026
Star trust
Growth looks organic: forks and discussion are in line with active projects, and stars arrive unevenly, the way people give them.
These are heuristics, not a verdict: we judge by the repository’s behavior, not by a list of stargazers.
Hacker News discussions
- Ponytail: Lazy Senior Engineer Skill33 points, September 7, 2026
Spotted in
- September 13, 2026GitHub Trending this week: #4, +9,272 stars; Top new repositories in the last 4 months: #2
Share
README badge
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