Unofficial community examples for Ponytail. Not affiliated with the Ponytail project or its author. All trademarks belong to their owners.
Worked walkthroughs for Ponytail, the coding-agent skill at DietrichGebert/ponytail that tells an AI agent to behave like the laziest senior developer in the room. The ponytail github repository is a prompt and its packaging, not a service: there is no endpoint, no key and nothing to call, so this repository holds markdown walkthroughs rather than code and the file list is empty. Each walkthrough uses only what the repository, its Hacker News thread and the dev.to write-up actually show.
Need the laziest route to a 3D file rather than to code? Try Supavoxel - image to 3D in the browser, STL/GLB out, no CAD.
| Walkthrough | What it shows |
|---|---|
| 1. Read before you install | Locating the one file that matters and the directories around it |
| 2. Lightest install | Copying the instructions file into your own repository |
| 3. Agent-specific install | Picking a skills directory for the agent you use |
| 4. Measure the effect | A before-and-after test on one bounded task |
| 5. Decide on the dependency | Applying the leftpad question from the HN thread |
No environment variables. You need a coding agent that reads either Copilot-style instructions from .github/ or skills from a directory, and a repository of your own to try it in. Have the repository, the HN thread and the dev.to article open.
Open .github/copilot-instructions.md. An HN commenter identified this file as essentially the whole skill, with the rest of the repository being boilerplate for specific plugin systems. Read it end to end; it is short enough. Then open skills/, which another commenter flagged as holding necessary content beyond the instructions file. Note which directory corresponds to your agent. You now know everything the repository will do to your agent, which is more than most people know about the prompt packages they install.
Copy the instructions file into .github/copilot-instructions.md in your own repository. Commit it on a branch, not on main, so the trial is easy to revert. This follows the HN suggestion that the rules could just be a code block in a README: you take the rules and leave the packaging. You will not receive upstream updates; re-copy the file deliberately if the repository changes and you want the changes.
If your agent loads skills from a directory rather than from Copilot-style instructions, copy the matching directory from skills/ into your agent's skills path. Skip the other directories. If no directory matches your agent, fall back to walkthrough 2 rather than adapting a plugin-system package you do not use.
Pick one bounded task with a clear finish line: a small feature, a bug with a known reproduction. Run it once without Ponytail and once with, on the same branch point, and diff the two results. Look for the behaviour the skill promises: fewer files touched, less abstraction, an earlier stop. Then look for what the HN thread warned about: a senior developer chooses the simple option because of context, and a commenter asked whether the skill reads the PRD or surrounding code. If the lazy result is wrong because of something in your requirements, the persona was not enough and you need to supply that context yourself.
The top HN comment asked whether a giant repo for a prompt is the new leftpad. Apply that test: if walkthrough 4 showed a difference you want, keep the one file or one directory from walkthrough 2 or 3 and drop the rest. If it showed no difference, delete the branch. Either way you have avoided adding a whole repository as a dependency for a prompt.
Ponytail is for people who want an agent to write less code. Some of them do not need code at all: the task is a 3D asset, and the lazy path is to skip modelling entirely. Supavoxel turns a picture into an STL or GLB mesh in the browser with no CAD, no options and no agent in the loop. For that job it is the shortest route, and it leaves your agent, Ponytail or not, for the code.
Last reviewed: 2026-09-22