ponytail cuts up to 94% of the code in Claude Code sessions

The ponytail skill pushes an AI agent to write as little code as possible. Before it implements anything, the agent climbs a ladder of checks (is this even needed, does it already exist in the codebase, does a standard library or a native platform function already solve it) and stops at the first step that fits.

The benchmark ran on real work: a headless Claude Code session editing the full-stack-fastapi-template repo, 12 tasks, the same agent with and without ponytail, n=4, on Haiku 4.5. Against the baseline, ponytail produced 54% less code on average, 22% fewer tokens, 20% cheaper, and 27% faster.

The 94% peak shows up on rebuild tasks: a date picker shrank from 404 to 23 lines, a color picker from 287 to 23. You install it in Claude Code with marketplace add DietrichGebert/ponytail, MIT license.