ponytail-gain

dietrichgebert/ponytail/ponytail-gain

The ponytail-gain skill displays ponytail's measured impact as a compact scoreboard, showing less code, less cost, and more speed, based on benchmark medians. It is a one-shot display and does not change mode or persist anything. The scoreboard presents benchmark medians from five everyday tasks (email validator, debounce, CSV sum, countdown timer, rate limiter) across three models (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus). It shows comparisons for lines of code, cost, and speed, and points to /ponytail-debt and /ponytail-audit for more repo-specific information. Note that these figures are benchmark medians, not per-repo savings.

インストール · 952出典を見る

Installation

npx skills add https://github.com/dietrichgebert/ponytail --skill ponytail-gain

スキルファイル

SKILL.md

最終同期 · 2026/10/22

SKILL.md›

---
name: ponytail-gain
description: >
  Show ponytail's measured savings (code, cost, speed) from the benchmark.
  One-shot display. Use for /ponytail-gain, "what does ponytail save",
  "ponytail impact".
---

# Ponytail Gain

Display this scoreboard when invoked. One-shot: do NOT change mode, write flag
files, or persist anything.

The figures are the published agentic benchmark of Ponytail 5: headless Claude
Code (Opus 5.5, default effort) on 39 tasks (feature tickets in a real FastAPI +
React repo, bug fixes, security and privacy cases, small apps), 5 runs each,
against the same agent without the skill. 18 of the tasks have hidden checks
for correctness and safety. Each figure is the geometric mean of the per-task
medians. They are measured, not computed from the current repo.
Source: `benchmarks/results/2026-10-07-agentic.md` and the README.

## Scoreboard

Render plain ASCII bars. The bar length shows ponytail as a share of the
no-skill baseline; the label carries the exact figure:

```
  ponytail gain           benchmark · 39 tasks × 5 runs · Opus 5.5

  no-skill        ████████████████████  100%
  Lines of code   █████████···········   47%   ▼ 53%
  Output tokens   ███████████·········   55%   ▼ 45%
  Cost            ███████████████·····   74%   ▼ 26%
  Time            ████████████········   59%   ▼ 41%
  Hidden checks passed   97%  (no-skill 96%)
  Tests where the logic needs one   98%  (no-skill 68%)

  This repo:  /ponytail-debt  (shortcuts you deferred)
              /ponytail-audit (what's still cuttable)
```

## Honesty boundary

These are benchmark averages, not this repo. NEVER print a per-repo savings
number ("you saved X lines/tokens here"): the unbuilt version was never
written, so there is no real baseline to subtract from in a live repo. The
only real per-repo figures come from `/ponytail-debt` (a counted ledger), and
this card points there instead of inventing one.

## Boundaries

One-shot display. Edits nothing, changes no mode.