Ponytail setup, explained.

Transcript

Ponytail is a free plugin that stops AI coding agents from over-building simple features. Ask for a date picker and a normal agent might install a library, write a wrapper component, and add a stylesheet. With Ponytail active, it checks a seven rung ladder, finds the browser already has a native date input, and ships one line instead. It's the fastest rising repository on GitHub's trending page today, adding nine hundred forty four stars in twenty four hours, on top of more than one hundred ten thousand total. Here's how to set it up. In Claude Code, it installs through the plugin marketplace. Type slash plugin marketplace add DietrichGebert slash ponytail, then send a second prompt, slash plugin install ponytail at ponytail. Those have to be two separate prompts, sending them together does not work. In Codex, run codex plugin marketplace add DietrichGebert slash ponytail, then codex plugin add ponytail at ponytail. After that, run codex, open slash hooks, and trust its two lifecycle hooks before it takes effect. GitHub Copilot CLI follows the same pattern: copilot plugin marketplace add DietrichGebert slash ponytail, then copilot plugin install ponytail at ponytail. Once it's running, type slash ponytail with no argument to see the current level, full is the default, and ultra exists for when the codebase has really wronged you. Slash ponytail dash review checks your current diff for over-engineering and hands back a delete list. A few things to know before you rely on it. The Claude Code and Codex hooks are small Node.js scripts, so Node needs to be on your PATH, or the always-on activation just stays quiet instead of erroring. And if you ever uninstall it, run the cleanup script first, before removing the plugin, because that script lives inside the plugin's own folder. In the maintainer's own benchmark, a real coding agent editing a FastAPI and React codebase wrote fifty four percent less code with Ponytail active, for the exact same finished feature. That's the setup.