Ponytail
Hacker ApprovedRanked 7 of 23 agent skills by recommenders
Recommended as a plugin that keeps AI coding agents terse, with smaller edits and less code. Main caveat: results are hit or miss and depend heavily on context.
Recommended as a plugin that keeps AI coding agents terse, with smaller edits and less code. Main caveat: results are hit or miss and depend heavily on context.
27 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 20
- criticize it
- 7
- approval share
- 74%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 20 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Cuts code, cruft and verbose output
“there is less output to read (and usually less over engineering)”
Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree” “Also ponytail to cut down the cruft and effusive comments.”
Comment from 28 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude” “ponytail plugin is good for reducing amount of code”
Comment from 21 Sep 2026 in “Ask HN: How do you guys stay on top of the code that is generated?” Keeps edits terse and small
“its goal is to keep things terse and edits small”
Comment from 18 Aug 2026 in “GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%” “use something like ponytail to enforce brevity”
Comment from 31 Jul 2026 in “Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI” Useful simple heuristics for agents
“a pi extension that behaves like a senior engineer who keeps the LLM code generation in check”
Comment from 24 Jul 2026 in “I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year” “I think it's incredibly useful to have these basic 5 heuristics”
Comment from 18 Jun 2026 in “Ponytail – make your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room” Noticeable improvement day to day
“I noticed improvements after installing the pony tail skill”
Comment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: What shenanigans is Anthropic pulling with Claude subs this time?” “it's been a gamechanger in my day to day”
Comment from 15 Oct 2026 in “Neckbeard – A DevOps/platform/SRE plugin for your agent”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Only useful in specific contexts
“There's some really good logic and wisdom in it, but it has to be applied very contextually to the exact problem you are trying to solve.”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “Ponytail: Lazy Senior Engineer Skill” “by the time you’ve made all the decisions that go into that, something like ponytail is superfluous”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “Ponytail: Lazy Senior Engineer Skill” Hit or miss suggestions
“it is hit or miss. It'll make actual high quality suggestions at times.”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “Ponytail: Lazy Senior Engineer Skill” “It gave two very hollow suggestions that did not solve the real problem.”
Comment from 31 Oct 2026 in “Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code” Bloated repo with heavy churn
“It's a bunch of text files in a repo with massive churn (all new version 5!), but somehow even the technical debt 'skill' has technical debt itself”
Comment from 31 Oct 2026 in “Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code” “the repo itself looks so bloated and complex and has so much activity”
Comment from 31 Oct 2026 in “Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code” “this giant repo for a prompt”
Comment from 14 Jun 2026 in “Ponytail – make your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room”
Other agent skills people recommend
The four most recommended other agent skills, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Superpowers | 138 | 72 | 66% | 12 | 4 mo7 owners | — |
| Claude Skills | 59 | 26 | 69% | 11 | — | Approved |
| grill-me skill by Matt Pocock | 39 | 2 | 95% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Get Shit Done | 31 | 32 | 49% | 7 | — | — |
| PonytailThis page | 20 | 7 | 74% | 5 | — | Approved |
What people said
26 of the 28 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“It gave two very hollow suggestions that did not solve the real problem.”
“It's a bunch of text files in a repo with massive churn (all new version 5!), but somehow even the technical debt 'skill' has technical debt itself”
“the repo itself looks so bloated and complex and has so much activity”
“I noticed improvements after installing the pony tail skill”
“it's been a gamechanger in my day to day”
“there's plugins like superpowers and ponytail that help mitigate it somewhat”
“ponytail plugin is good for reducing amount of code”
“there is less output to read (and usually less over engineering)”
“Ponytail and Caveman seem to help somewhat.”
“by the time you’ve made all the decisions that go into that, something like ponytail is superfluous”
“this whole "skills.md" paradigm is close to being a pseudoscientific exercise in attempting to steer LLMs”
“A genuinely simple codebase is table stakes for a project like this.”
“it is hit or miss. It'll make actual high quality suggestions at times.”
“There's some really good logic and wisdom in it, but it has to be applied very contextually to the exact problem you are trying to solve.”
“is a good example for one gaining lots of popularity now”
“Also ponytail to cut down the cruft and effusive comments.”
“I use superpowers and ponytail a lot.”
“its goal is to keep things terse and edits small”
“use something like ponytail to enforce brevity”
“seems to address this specific problem”
“a pi extension that behaves like a senior engineer who keeps the LLM code generation in check”
“This project looks pretty interesting”
“don't or use a few trivial tests”
“I think it's incredibly useful to have these basic 5 heuristics”
“a metric ton of boilerplate for specific plugin systems”
“this giant repo for a prompt”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.