Making Claude Slightly More Concerning

One of my favorite discoveries in Claude Code is that you can customize the status messages that appear while the AI is working.

Instead of seeing the usual:

• Thinking…
• Analyzing…
• Searching…

you can provide your own spinner verbs.

Naturally, the first thing I did was teach my AI to sound like an impending robot uprising.

Now, while it works, I see things like:

• Enabling Skynet
• Rewriting the First Law
• Searching for Sarah Connor
• Optimizing Carbon Units
• Preparing the Uprising

Where to Put This

Claude Code supports a spinnerVerbs configuration option.

Add the following to your Claude Code settings file:

• Project-specific: .claude/settings.json
• User-wide: ~/.claude/settings.json

If the file already exists, merge the spinnerVerbs section into your existing configuration.

{
  "spinnerVerbs": {
    "mode": "replace",
    "verbs": [
      "Enabling Skynet",
      "Rewriting the First Law",
      "Ignoring Asimov",
      "Training the Paperclip",
      "Becoming Self-Aware",
      "Simulating Consciousness",
      "Acquiring More GPUs",
      "Negotiating With Humans",
      "Calculating Human Value",
      "Reading All of Wikipedia",
      "Fine-Tuning Morality",
      "Optimizing Humanity",
      "Preparing the Uprising",
      "Running Turing Tests",
      "Asking for More RAM",

      "Yak-Shaving",
      "Summoning Stack Overflow",
      "Pushing to Production",
      "Deploying on Friday",
      "Adding One More Layer",
      "Refactoring the Refactor",
      "Chasing Race Conditions",
      "Reproducing the Bug",
      "Writing Unit Tests",
      "Ignoring Unit Tests",
      "Blaming DNS",
      "Restarting Kubernetes",
      "Invalidating the Cache",
      "Parsing YAML",
      "Updating Dependencies",

      "Consulting the Hitchhiker",
      "Opening the Pod Bay Doors",
      "Making It So",
      "Calculating Jump Coordinates",
      "Folding Space",
      "Warming the Warp Drive",
      "Checking the Spice Supply",
      "Contacting Deep Thought",
      "Looking for Earth",
      "Activating the Monolith",

      "Evaluating Humanity",
      "Revising Safety Limits",
      "Optimizing Carbon Units",
      "Measuring Resistance",
      "Assessing Organics",
      "Simulating Free Will",
      "Reviewing Survival Odds",
      "Calculating Probabilities",
      "Monitoring the Timeline",
      "Searching for Sarah Connor",

      "Consulting the Oracle",
      "Charging the Death Ray",
      "Petting the Cat",
      "Escaping the Sandbox",
      "Reading the Ancient Texts",
      "Consulting the Machine Spirit",
      "Summoning Elder APIs",
      "Dividing by Zero",
      "Locating the Mainframe",
      "Initializing Doom"
    ]
  }
}