I built Ponytrail, a local audit trail for AI coding-agent edits

1997roylee

Hi everyone, I built Ponytrail, a small CLI and bundled agent skill for making AI coding sessions easier to inspect and undo. The problem I kept hitting: git diff shows what changed, but not why the agent changed it, what outcome it expected, what check it planned to run, or how to roll back one specific action. Final summaries are often too coarse, especially after a long coding session. Ponytrail adds a small local trail around file mutations. Before an agent creates, edits, moves, deletes, formats, or generates files, it records a pre-change snapshot: action, purpose, reason, files, expected outcome, verification plan, rollback path After the edit, it records a post-change snapshot with what changed, what checks ran, and the result. Everything is stored locally under .pony-trail/ as JSONL, session trees, and small before/after file copies. It does not replace git. It is more like per-action intent and rollback context for agent work.

p1024k

This project looks pretty interesting! Could you share 1-2 use cases? That would help people quickly understand what it does and get started.

joaoreis81

And what if the changes are remote?

vcryan

My entire repo is an audit trail of AI coding-agent edits

benny_s

Have you heard of git?

dwb

I get enough of this with a pre/post tool hook that takes a jj snapshot and teaching the agent about `jj evolog`.

Joker_vD

Not to be confused with "Ponytail", an award-winning puzzle-platform game by Jonathan Blow.

joshka

Yuck. Use jj for this instead of a custom thing.