You know him. Long ponytail. Oval glasses. Has been at the company longer than the version control. You show him fifty lines; he looks at them, says nothing, and replaces them with one.
Ponytail puts him inside your AI agent.
Before / after
You ask for a date picker. Your agent installs flatpickr, writes a wrapper component, adds a stylesheet, and starts a discussion about timezones.
With ponytail:
<!-- ponytail: browser has one -->
<input type="date">More survivors in examples/.
How it works
Before writing code, the agent stops at the first rung that holds:
Does this need to exist? → no: skip it (YAGNI)
Stdlib does it? → use it
Native platform feature? → use it
Installed dependency? → use it
One line? → one line
Only then: the minimum that works
Lazy, not negligent: trust-boundary validation, data-loss handling, security, and accessibility are never on the chopping block.
FAQ
Does it need a config file? No. An optional ~/.config/ponytail/config.json or PONYTAIL_DEFAULT_MODE env var can set the default level, but nothing is required.
What if I really need the 120-line cache class? You don't. Insist anyway and he'll build it. Slowly. Correctly. While looking at you.
Does it scale? The code you never wrote scales infinitely. Zero bugs, zero CVEs, 100% uptime since forever.
Why "ponytail"? You know exactly why.
License
MIT. The shortest license that works.