Ponytail – make your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room | Hacker News Reader

Ponytail – make your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room

github.com

98 pointsmellosouls17 comments

Oh the irony of this giant repo for a prompt. Is this the new leftpad?

My thoughts exactly. The whole thing is essentially just these rules, and a metric ton of boilerplate for specific plugin systems.

My own personal ponytail says this could just be this in a code block of a README

https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail/blob/main/.github...

The skills dirs have some necessary content (or so I assume):

https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail/tree/main/skills

Real senior developers can do that because they have experience and can put that in context. E.g. <input type="date"> maybe fine for one scenario, but we might need a fancier one for another. I wonder if the skill takes PRD or the surrounding code into context to better emulate those developers?

A lot of it is about developing good judgement, IMO.

> You ask for a date picker

    <input type="date">

wow... this is me

I had long discussions over whether we could just not use tons on npm libraries and use the native browser feature for things like that. I typically lose these discussions because I'm considered the backend guy. My knowledge about HTML, JS and CSS dates back to times when there was no npm...

People often forget how good tablet and mobile datepickers have gotten as well. They may not match your sites weird style exactly, but they'll feel native and handle lots of things like ADA compliance that your crappy custom one likely won't.

"you're" here referring to higher ups not you personally

I will be trying this ASAP. With the locally hosted models I've run and Gemeni's free no-login results, I've found they love to put in everything the skill here tells it not to. Today one in Python put a lambda that has no arguments to call a function that takes no arguments instead of just passing the function. There's at least one linter that checks for that but still it's a lot of babysitting to get good code.

The repo is bigger than most of the code Ponytail would allow me to write.

In the spirit of the project, I can replace this with a "one-liner":

    Is there a simpler solution?

Wizard spells more than engineering

We are past weaving wizard spells. Now we are at cunning demon summoning.

Wait is this a joke? I think it's incredibly useful to have these basic 5 heuristics. I've been trying to wrangle the agents to make very simple deletions and text edits quicker, faster. But just saying "go faster on these edits" isn't doing it.

calling it "think" is crazy gng,

This joke repository is so offensive! I haven't even had a ponytail since 1996.

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