Dietrich Gebert

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

There's no shortage of people online who will criticize an open-source AI tool without ever running it, let alone benchmarking it.

So instead of arguing, I benchmarked my own project as hard as I could and published all of it.

Ponytail is a small open-source skill that gets AI coding agents to write only the code a task actually needs, without dropping the validation and safety checks that matter. The claim has always been that it cuts a lot of code. Some people doubted that. Fair enough, numbers should be earned.

So I ran the hard version: a real coding agent editing a real open-source repository, the same agent with and without the skill, a critic's own suggested one-liner prompt included as a control, repeated runs, fully reproducible.

Across 12 tasks it wrote about 54% less code than the same agent without the skill. The spread is wide and I report all of it: close to zero on code that was already minimal, and as much as 94% on the cases where an agent tends to over-build, like a date picker where a native input replaces a hand-rolled component. It never wrote more than the baseline. On a separate set of adversarial tasks it kept every safety check, while the bare "just write one-liners" prompt missed one, a path-traversal guard.

Ponytail was never about a flashy number on a homepage. I built it because I was tired of reviewing hundreds of lines of AI-generated code that should have been ten. The goal is simple: help developers ship what is necessary and not a line more, without cutting the corners that matter.

That is also why it is open source and fully reproducible. Anyone can run the exact benchmark and check every number. Criticism is easy. Running the test is the part that counts.

Repo and full writeup: https://t.co/OQx9bM8eoy. If you want to poke holes in it, please do.

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

@WebstarDavid 🤣 To be honest, sometime I come across code where I think what a piece of waste, until I blame and see my name on it.

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

Spoiler season is over. ponytail v4.7.0 is now legal in the OpenClaw format.

One card. Splashable in every deck: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini.

0 cost. Negative lines of text. The meta is cooked.

The community wants it banned. Banning it is effort.

clawhub install ponytail
https://t.co/CwOm3BU8Em

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

@DeRonin_ Thank you very much for the share, your post really made my day.
The mental model is not to cut as much code as possible but only to write what is necessary.
Thanks again!

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

ponytail v4.5.0 — lazy in Copilot

ponytail now lives in the Copilot Marketplace. same job: talk your agent out of the code it didn't need to write.

huge shoutout to @maxfelker, who built the entire integration — tests, docs, CI — while ponytail merged it without reading. as intended.

⭐ dietrichgebert/ponytail

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

10,000 stars in 3 days. I genuinely did not see this coming.
Thank you to everyone who starred, shared, and tried ponytail.

https://t.co/7puVASvqGQ

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

@pvergadia Thank you @pvergadia, really appreciate the spread🙏

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

ponytail v4.4.0: field-tested, still lazy!

a dev ran it across a real 9-phase build: protocol → desktop app → sim → RPi daemon → ESP32 firmware. verdict: net win, never once trimmed a failsafe.

what's new:
→ /ponytail-debt, tracks every shortcut you deferred
→ rules hardened from that run
→ a behavior eval so they can't quietly regress
⭐ https://t.co/CwOm3BU8Em

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

@panzonhl @real_klea Hey, thanks for reaching out! I have no affiliation with any coins or tokens and I'd like to keep it that way. Appreciate it though!

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

I built ponytail, the senior dev who closes your PR with "no," reopens it himself, and somehow solves everything in a seventh of the lines. don't ask.

no skill: 3,629 lines
caveman: 1,440
ponytail: 490
same model, same tests, same pass rate.
https://t.co/VCGDIGeNre

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

@real_klea Thank you so much! Knowing that you like it is already payment enough.

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

@Denzelcooks Thank you! Glad you like it 🤝

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

@WO100O @storymodewizard Same spirit, different target. Caveman makes the model talk less (compresses the prose). Ponytail makes it build less (YAGNI, stdlib first, less code). They stack, I run both: caveman trims what it says, ponytail trims what it writes.

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

@FalkTG Ja, warum nicht gleich PayPal Ratenzahlung? Mach dich nicht lächerlich.

[Dietrich Gebert @DietrichGebert]

@ElonMuskAOC Double it and give it to the next person