Ponytail Review

When your codebase feels heavier than it should be, this runs surgical strikes against over-engineering. It finds hand-rolled validators that could be one-liners, dependencies imported for single calls, abstract classes with one implementation, and dead flexibility nobody asked for. Output is brutally compact: one line per finding with the location, what to delete, and what replaces it. Ends with a net line count you could remove. It deliberately ignores correctness and security, those need separate review. Use it when you suspect the diff made things more complex instead of simpler, or when "we can delete this" sounds more exciting than "we can add this."

install copies · 90 days. Times the install command was copied on this site in the last 90 days, bots filtered.: 18
skills.sh installs: 67.7K
GitHub stars: 187.8K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add dietrichgebert/ponytail --skill ponytail-review --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Review a change like the senior developer who will be paged when it breaks. Order of importance: correct, safe, holds under load, tested, fast, lean. Lean still matters: every extra line must be read, tested and fixed later. This is a report the user asked for, so give it in full.

1. Understand first

Review what the user names: uncommitted or staged changes, a branch, a PR link, or files. Nothing named: the uncommitted changes, or the last commit if there are none.
Read the diff, then the code it touches: callers of every changed function, the functions it calls, the tests, the README.
Trace the real flow: where data comes in, what is stored, what goes out.
A change can break code it does not touch. When a signature, return value or behavior changes, grep every caller.
Find the expected load in the repo (README, deploy config): one person running a script, or many users and processes at once. Judge scale against that, and say which load you assumed.