Ponytail gain

Skill DietrichGebert/ponytail/skills/ponytail-gain

Makes your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room. The best code is the code you never wrote.

Install

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

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

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Show ponytail's measured impact as a compact scoreboard: less code, less cost, more speed, from the benchmark medians. One-shot display, not a persistent mode, and not a per-repo number. Trigger: /ponytail-gain, "ponytail gain", "what does ponytail save", "show ponytail impact", "ponytail scoreboard".

SKILL.md

1.9 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Ponytail Gain

Display this scoreboard when invoked. One-shot: do NOT change mode, write flag files, or persist anything.

The figures are the published benchmark medians (5 everyday tasks: email validator, debounce, CSV sum, countdown timer, rate limiter; three models: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus). They are measured, not computed from the current repo. Source: benchmarks/ and the README.

Scoreboard

Render plain ASCII bars. The bar length shows the measured range; the label carries the exact figure:

  ponytail gain                     benchmark median · 5 tasks · 3 models

  Lines of code   no-skill  ████████████████████  100%
                  ponytail  ██▌·················    6–20%   ▼ 80–94%
  Cost            no-skill  ████████████████████  100%
                  ponytail  █████▌··············   23–53%  ▼ 47–77%
  Speed           ponytail  ▸ 3–6× faster

  This repo:  /ponytail-debt  (shortcuts you deferred)
              /ponytail-audit (what's still cuttable)

Honesty boundary

These are benchmark medians, not this repo. NEVER print a per-repo savings number ("you saved X lines/tokens here"): the unbuilt version was never written, so there is no real baseline to subtract from in a live repo. The only real per-repo figures come from /ponytail-debt (a counted ledger), and this card points there instead of inventing one.

Boundaries

One-shot display. Edits nothing, changes no mode. "stop ponytail" or "normal mode": revert.