ponytail-audit and ponytail-review target structural slop: speculative abstraction, reinvented stdlib, dead flexibility, the kind you fix by deleting. But a very common shape of AI-generated slop has nothing structurally redundant to delete: over-defensive control flow (deeply nested condition ladders, redundant guards) and blanket try/except / catch wrappers that swallow uncertainty. The deletion-first ladder skips these because there's no unused abstraction to cut, yet a guard clause collapses the ladder and one boundary handler replaces the blanket catch.
The pass has to stay surgical, because ponytail rightly says never simplify away error handling that prevents data loss. So the rule is flatten, don't delete:
- nested conditionals become guard clauses / early exits
- delete broad exception wrappers that hide uncertainty; keep one handler at the real boundary
- replace expected non-exceptional cases with explicit precondition checks
Suggested: one ## Hunt bullet to that effect.
Sources: Refactoring.Guru, "Replace Nested Conditional with Guard Clauses"; Martin Fowler on guard clauses. See also LLM-specific code-smell taxonomies (e.g. arXiv 2510.03029) for grounding on how generated code trends.
Happy to open the PR if useful.
ponytail-auditandponytail-reviewtarget structural slop: speculative abstraction, reinvented stdlib, dead flexibility, the kind you fix by deleting. But a very common shape of AI-generated slop has nothing structurally redundant to delete: over-defensive control flow (deeply nested condition ladders, redundant guards) and blankettry/except/catchwrappers that swallow uncertainty. The deletion-first ladder skips these because there's no unused abstraction to cut, yet a guard clause collapses the ladder and one boundary handler replaces the blanket catch.The pass has to stay surgical, because ponytail rightly says never simplify away error handling that prevents data loss. So the rule is flatten, don't delete:
Suggested: one
## Huntbullet to that effect.Sources: Refactoring.Guru, "Replace Nested Conditional with Guard Clauses"; Martin Fowler on guard clauses. See also LLM-specific code-smell taxonomies (e.g. arXiv 2510.03029) for grounding on how generated code trends.
Happy to open the PR if useful.