Ponytail skill
A minimalism ruleset for coding agents: it pushes the agent toward the smallest correct change and away from speculative abstraction, with the stated philosophy that the best code is the code you never wrote.
What it does for you: Axion builds accumulate scope fast when an agent over engineers a quick fix into a new abstraction layer. Dropping Ponytail's rules into a project's instructions could trim that habit before it costs YY review time, and because it is just text and config, not a running service, the risk of adopting it is low. Worth a side by side trial on one live Axion build to see if output actually gets leaner.
In practice: Reads like a genuine engineering philosophy someone distilled from real frustration, not a gimmick repo. The 162.7k star count climbed fast, which is itself worth treating with a little caution until it settles.
For: Both runtimes. Ships as a plain ruleset and CLI pattern rather than a Claude specific plugin, so it works inside any coding agent harness, Claude Code or Hermes included.
Verdict: test first. Low adoption risk, since it only changes agent behavior rather than running code, but the viral growth is recent enough that its real world effect on build quality has not been proven yet.
Build #1 Ponytail: use the ai-implementation-build-intake skill to build this safely. Source: https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail. Save canonical skill/agent under AXION\Skills and AXION\Agents.
Source · GitHub About panel confirmed live on 2026-10-13: 162.7k stars, MIT license.