Agent skills & prompts

DietrichGebert/ponytail

Stops the agent before it writes needless code

105k
MIT
JavaScript

What it is and why it matters

Ponytail is a skill that forces the agent through a series of gates before it codes: does this need to be built, does the function already exist, is there a library for it? Only after passing those gates does it get a green light, with instructions to use the least code possible. The aim is to cut token usage without losing effectiveness.

Key points

Adds decision gates that avoid rewriting what already exists
The repo publishes its own benchmarks so you can reproduce them
Simple install: it can be added as a skill to Claude Code

Where we saw it

Chase AI 2026-07-08 The video's author frames Ponytail as a skill to lower token spend: it forces the agent through gates (does it exist, is there a library) before coding and to use minimal code. He says he ran the repo's benchmarks with Opus and Fable and got equivalent output at lower cost; he notes the repo's own benchmarks used a different model and that real-world results depend on the use case. 5 Open Source Repos That Fix 95% of Claude Code's Problems

Same category

multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills A single CLAUDE.md with four principles to improve Claude Code Open detail mattpocock/skills End-to-end skills workflow for AI coding Open detail addyosmani/agent-skills Skills that give agents a disciplined engineering workflow Open detail