ponytail

“AI agents love to over-deliver. Ask for email validation and you get a 27-line EmailValidator class with a wrapper and a regex that's somehow still wrong. So I built Ponytail. It's a skill that channels the senior dev everyone knows. Long ponytail, oval glasses, seen it all. Says nothing, writes one line, it works. Before it writes anything it walks a little ladder. Does this even need to exist? Does the standard library already do it? Is there a native platform feature? An existing dependency? ”

“xx!rr@tt55**@pp@.. Your lazy senior dev's code thinks this is a valid email address.”

“i love this. it's like all the senior devs at the all the startups i worked at. you should add a bonus personality. argues with you if the feature is even implementable in the way you explained it or not. will not work until the feature is explained correctly.”

“Two great AI coding skills already exist: Ponytail (minimal code, YAGNI-first) and Caveman (terse prose). We didn't build 🍯 Honey (I Shrunk the AI) to replace them, we merged what each does best and added a third lever they don't have. Where each wins and loses (23 tasks, Claude Opus 4.8, 3 runs each, 4-model judge panel — neutral rubric, no length bonus): Task tier Caveman Ponytail 🍯 Honey Code (14 tasks) 101% quality · −37% tokens 99% · +24% 98% · −49% User-facing (7 tasks) 99% · −18% 95% · ”

“AI agents love to over-deliver. Ask for email validation and you get a 27-line EmailValidator class with a wrapper and a regex that's somehow still wrong. So I built Ponytail. It's a skill that channels the senior dev everyone knows. Long ponytail, oval glasses, seen it all. Says nothing, writes one line, it works. Before it writes anything it walks a little ladder. Does this even need to exist? Does the standard library already do it? Is there a native platform feature? An existing dependency? ”

“I hate code like this. Dev thinks its clever, but is unintelligible until you spend 10 minutes thinking about it”

“I like the speed, but I’m trying to get better at using it in a controlled way. Curious what workflows people use for planning, reviewing diffs, and keeping changes from sprawling. Do you make it work in small tasks, ask for a plan first, use tests, or something else?”

“Ponytail Small batches of changes properly planned and reviewed once a week full repo review short Claude.md with basic coding standards rules (like don’t mix layers - domain, ui, data, decouple, don’t use magic numbers and abbreviations etc.) let it document architectural decisions always let Opus with a clear context to review the implementation against ACs It’s about self-control… yes, you can grind a huge project in a blink of an eye, but mess will be buggy, and every new change will introdu”