Ponytail debt

Skill DietrichGebert/ponytail/.openclaw/skills/ponytail-debt

Harvest every ponytail: shortcut comment into one debt ledger, so deferrals get tracked instead of forgotten. One-shot report.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add DietrichGebert/ponytail --skill ponytail-debt

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

runs commandsInstructs the agent to run 2 commands, including `grep -rnE '(#|//) ?ponytail:' .` and 1 more.

What its file declares

Copied from the file, not written here

The file declares its own license as MIT. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

1.5 KB, 331 tokens by cl100k_base, 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.

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.