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Comment by greggh | Hacker News Reader

He doesnt need that when he has Ponytail https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail

Right? ...

I've never heard of Ponytail before, I've read the entire README and glanced through this repo and I'm left so confused. From what I can gather this project is essentially a single markdown file with a prompt that verbosely says "write the simplest code". Yet the repo itself looks so bloated and complex and has so much activity. This feels like satire similar to fizzbuzz enterprise edition[1] but apparently this is the actual state of our industry?

[1] https://github.com/enterprisequalitycoding/fizzbuzzenterpris...

The date picker example is perhaps the best worst they could have picked.

Anyone who has used the built in date picker knows why everyone rolls their own.

Is this entire repo satire?

It's a bunch of text files in a repo with massive churn (all new version 5!), but somehow even the technical debt 'skill' (i.e. text file) has technical debt itself:

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

> ...every ponytail shortcut is marked with a shortcut: comment ... (older code may say ponytail:).

That’s what I thought. Then a colleague introduced it for real in a code review.

It doesn’t matter if it’s satire. Developers seem to be so vulnerable to all these AI promises of ‘automating’ everything.

BTW it’s terrible. It gave two very hollow suggestions that did not solve the real problem. Hour wasted, angry colleagues, no code change.

The AI craze very much reminds me of the crypto craze a few years ago - lots of people new to the industry jumping on the latest trend and building tooling for something that doesn't need tooling, trying to sell shovels in a gold rush, but just spending years creating a gold-plated shovel which nobody needs instead.

And Web 3, Metaverse, Blockchain, NFT… Only this time it’s kind of useful.

Yes that's true it is more like the dot.com bubble in that regard - a useful technology which will clearly grow over time, but overhyped in the initial phases as everyone tries to be 'AI' in 2026, in 1999 it was online, whether it fits with their business or not.

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