Makes your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room. The best code is the code you never wrote.
Ponytail is an AI agent skill that instructs Claude Code to write minimal, efficient code by applying a decision ladder before writing anything: checking if the feature is needed at all, if it exists elsewhere in the codebase, if the standard library covers it, if a platform feature works, if an existing dependency solves it, and only then writing the minimum necessary code. The project addresses the problem domain of developer tooling and code generation, helping AI agents avoid over-engineering. Built for Claude and integrated with Claude Code and Cursor, ponytail is implemented as a prompt-engineering skill for large language models, with benchmarks demonstrating it reduces code lines by 80–94% compared to baseline Claude across multiple model sizes while maintaining safety and correctness on real repository edits and adversarial security tests.