head to head · open source
ponytail vs adhd
ponytail has 182,779 GitHub stars, 10,094 forks, 270 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. adhd has 4,498 stars, 299 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. ponytail leads on adoption by 3,964% (182,779 vs 4,498 stars). ponytail is written in JavaScript under MIT; adhd is written in TypeScript under MIT. ponytail has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, adhd 7%. ponytail was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai-agents, claude), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| ponytail | adhd | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 183K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-29 | 2026-10-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 299 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ponytail if
- You weight community size — 183K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick adhd if
- You want the adhd feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and adhd fits your workflow better
About ponytail
Ponytail He says nothing. He writes one line. It works. 54% less code (up to 94%) · 20% cheaper · 27% faster · 100% safe Measured on real Claude Code sessions editing a real open source repo (FastAPI + React), against the same agent with no skill. 54% is the mean across 12 feature tasks (Haiku 4.5, n=4); it reaches 94% where an agent over builds (a date picker) and is near zero where the code is already minimal. ponytail keeps every safety guard while a bare "write one liners" prompt drops one. (The earlier single shot benchmark reported 80 94% as a flat figure; against a fair agentic…
read the full ponytail overview →
About adhd
ADHD — a skill for agents 🎮 Join the Discord → for frame design, eval problems, and trap hunting in real time · 👉 Join the community → as a contributor, maintainer, or early adopter (one short form). An architectural fix for premature convergence in autoregressive reasoning. Linear Chain of Thought anchors on whatever it says first. Tree of Thought widens the search but still walks a single shared context, so the anchoring persists across branches. ADHD treats this as an architectural problem, not a prompting one — it spawns N isolated reasoning processes under deliberately distorted cognitive frames, with…
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Frequently asked questions
Is ponytail or adhd more popular?
ponytail has 182,779 GitHub stars and adhd has 4,498. ponytail has the larger community by that measure.
Are ponytail and adhd free?
Both are open source. ponytail is licensed under MIT and adhd under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ponytail and adhd?
ponytail is written in JavaScript and adhd in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, ponytail or adhd?
Choose ponytail if you want the larger community (182,779 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose adhd if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.