ponytail-gain

★ 75,041

by dietrichgebert · part of dietrichgebert/ponytail

Show ponytail measured impact as a scoreboard: less code, less cost, more speed, from the benchmark medians. One-shot display.

🔌 This skill ships inside the ponytail plugin — install the plugin and you also get hooks.

This is the playbook your agent receives when the skill activates — you don't need to read it to use the skill, but it's here to audit before installing.

Ponytail Gain

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

The figures are the published benchmark medians (5 everyday tasks: email validator, debounce, CSV sum, countdown timer, rate limiter; three models: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus). They are measured, not computed from the current repo. Source: benchmarks/ and the README.

Scoreboard

Render plain ASCII bars. The bar length shows the measured range; the label carries the exact figure:

  ponytail gain                     benchmark median · 5 tasks · 3 models

  Lines of code   no-skill  ████████████████████  100%
                  ponytail  ██▌·················    6–20%   ▼ 80–94%
  Cost            no-skill  ████████████████████  100%
                  ponytail  █████▌··············   23–53%  ▼ 47–77%
  Speed           ponytail  ▸ 3–6× faster

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

Honesty boundary

These are benchmark medians, 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. "stop ponytail" or "normal mode": revert.