The Free Skill That Makes Claude Code Write Less

Ask Claude Code for a small app and it often builds a big one, and every extra line comes out of your plan's usage limit. Ponytail is a free, open source skill by Dietrich Gebert that makes your coding harness (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and around twenty more) work like "the laziest senior dev in the room": it writes only what the task needs, and never cuts validation, error handling, security or accessibility. We gave Claude Code the same request three times with Ponytail 5 and three times without: a beautiful weather app that finds your location, with an animated sky. With it, Claude Code wrote 227 lines on average instead of 1,052, for $0.41 a run instead of $1.43, and every app worked. Then we tried the seven words Colin Eberhardt of Scott Logic showed can stand in for it, "Follow YAGNI principles, and one-liner solutions", on the same request. In the video: setting it up in Claude Code, and how it goes in Codex and Cursor; the ladder of questions it climbs before writing code; its three levels; the cost panel and the history board; its review, audit and shortcut tools; the maker's own numbers, said honestly (about half the code, about a quarter off each session); what it means on a Claude or Cursor plan; Caveman by Julius Brussee, which makes the agent say less rather than write less; the catch, and how to remove it cleanly; and the seven words, head to head. Ponytail on GitHub: https://github.com/DietrichGebert/pon... (install it only from there or from @dietrichgebert/ponytail on npm) What you need: Claude Code on a paid Claude plan, or Codex, Cursor or one of around twenty other coding harnesses, and Node.js installed (its helper scripts run on it). The cost panel needs Claude Code 2.1.290 or later, in the terminal or the desktop app. To remove it cleanly, the order that worked for us: /plugin uninstall ponytail@ponytail, close Claude Code, run node ~/.claude/plugins/marketplaces/ponytail/scripts/uninstall.js, then /plugin marketplace remove ponytail, and delete ~/.config/ponytail/band/ (its task history) yourself. We tested Ponytail 5.3.2 with Claude Code 2.1.312 and Claude Opus 5.5 at default effort. Costs are Claude Code's own estimates at API prices; on a subscription they count against your limit instead. One request shows what happened on that request, not a general saving. Know an open source project we should check out next? Tell us in the comments. Subscribe to Open Source Repositories to discover the best open source projects. Project: https://github.com/DietrichGebert/pon... Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:51 Setting it up 2:12 How it works 3:30 With and without it 4:52 The three levels 5:43 The cost panel 6:34 Checking its work 7:34 Where it helps most 8:26 What it saves you 9:58 Against the seven words 11:37 The catch 12:22 Our verdict