Ponytail debt
Portable Agent Skills for AI-assisted engineering workflows
npx -y skills add barlevalon/skills --skill ponytail-debtAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
One thing to look at
- 2 stars2 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.
What its author says it does
Copied from the file, not written here
Harvest every `ponytail:` comment in the codebase into a debt ledger, so the deliberate shortcuts and deferrals ponytail leaves behind get tracked instead of rotting into "later means never". Use when the user says "ponytail debt", "/ponytail-debt", "what did ponytail defer", "list the shortcuts", "ponytail ledger", or "what did we mark to do later". One-shot report, changes nothing.
SKILL.md
1.7 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
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.