Claude Code's thinking animation

I am unfortunately ¹ I'll leave that sentiment as a topic for a separate post. spending more and more of my time interacting with LLMs through terminal interfaces. While the sentient silicon churns through thousands of tokens I find myself scrolling short-form videos contemplating next steps, freeing my time up for deeper mental pursuits, and much more importantly (and realistically) getting entranced by the blinking cursors.

Really one of the more ominous text snippets that OpenAI could be showing here, but I guess it's better than expressly disobeying.

Codex ² Gemini Claude

Codex's is fine, but I'm more a fan of Gemini and Claude's faux-thinking indicators (even if Gemini's is a little too millenial-internet coded). ³ "Assembling the interwebs" is too cutesy–2000s for a technology whose founders keep warning people that it's an existential threat. I wanted to see the full list of phrases and how they did the animations, which I found trivially by ripgrep-ing through the node_modules of the CLI packages.

Gemini

The "witty" phrases are sourced from /usr/local/bin/gemini_cli/node_modules/@google/gemini-cli/dist/src/ui/constants/wittyPhrases.js, ⁴ You can check out the full list on GitHub. and the icon animations come from the cli-spinners package (specifically the default dots spinner). That's composed of 8 frames, all from Braille.

As an interesting aside the Braille six-dot icons render weirdly on macOS Chrome. Despite using the "Apple Braille" font, it defaults to the PostScript "AppleBraille-Outline6Dot", which renders empty circles for each of the icons (there are actually five variants on macOS which you can click this button to toggle through). ⁵ To do this I extracted all of the Apple Braille variants from /System/Library/Fonts and then compressed this following my previous snippet to host them on this website. To explicitly choose the version without any dots I had to define a local @font-face with local("AppleBraille"); as the src.

Claude

Claude's icon animation is more bespoke, and mirrors its branding elsewhere. ⁶ Truly foolish of OpenAI to pick an icon that doesn't exist in Unicode: even Gemini ✦ and debatably Meta ∞ got it right. If they're considering a rebrand I suggest 🝏, the Scepter of Jove. We can grep through /usr/local/bin/claude_code/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js to find the individual marks that make it up. ⁷ Technically this is different for ghostty and non-Darwin terminals, which both leverage * as a larger and more centered visual element.

It also has 184 words that it pairs with this loading indicator. Because there's no public GitHub here they all are: ⁸ As of February 7th, 2026. There's a lot of great options in here that feel fresh, my personal favorites are the paired 'combobulating' and 'discombobulating' and 'shenaniganing'.

Accomplishing
Actioning
Actualizing
Architecting
Baking
Beaming
Beboppin'
Befuddling
Billowing
Blanching
Bloviating
Boogieing
Boondoggling
Booping
Bootstrapping
Brewing
Burrowing
Calculating
Canoodling
Caramelizing
Cascading
Catapulting
Cerebrating
Channeling
Channelling
Choreographing
Churning
Clauding
Coalescing
Cogitating
Combobulating
Composing
Computing
Concocting
Considering
Contemplating
Cooking
Crafting
Creating
Crunching
Crystallizing
Cultivating
Deciphering
Deliberating
Determining
Dilly-dallying
Discombobulating
Doing
Doodling
Drizzling
Ebbing
Effecting
Elucidating
Embellishing
Enchanting
Envisioning
Evaporating
Fermenting
Fiddle-faddling
Finagling
Flambéing
Flibbertigibbeting
Flowing
Flummoxing
Fluttering
Forging
Forming
Frolicking
Frosting
Gallivanting
Galloping
Garnishing
Generating
Germinating
Gitifying
Grooving
Gusting
Harmonizing
Hashing
Hatching
Herding
Honking
Hullaballooing
Hyperspacing
Ideating
Imagining
Improvising
Incubating
Inferring
Infusing
Ionizing
Jitterbugging
Julienning
Kneading
Leavening
Levitating
Lollygagging
Manifesting
Marinating
Meandering
Metamorphosing
Misting
Moonwalking
Moseying
Mulling
Mustering
Musing
Nebulizing
Nesting
Noodling
Nucleating
Orbiting
Orchestrating
Osmosing
Perambulating
Percolating
Perusing
Philosophising
Photosynthesizing
Pollinating
Pondering
Pontificating
Pouncing
Precipitating
Prestidigitating
Processing
Proofing
Propagating
Puttering
Puzzling
Quantumizing
Razzle-dazzling
Razzmatazzing
Recombobulating
Reticulating
Roosting
Ruminating
Sautéing
Scampering
Schlepping
Scurrying
Seasoning
Shenaniganing
Shimmying
Simmering
Skedaddling
Sketching
Slithering
Smooshing
Sock-hopping
Spelunking
Spinning
Sprouting
Stewing
Sublimating
Swirling
Swooping
Symbioting
Synthesizing
Tempering
Thinking
Thundering
Tinkering
Tomfoolering
Topsy-turvying
Transfiguring
Transmuting
Twisting
Undulating
Unfurling
Unravelling
Vibing
Waddling
Wandering
Warping
Whatchamacalliting
Whirlpooling
Whirring
Whisking
Wibbling
Working
Wrangling
Zesting
Zigzagging

I'm not sure that any of this distracts from the storm that's coming, but even as the entire industry shakes I can't help but appreciate some of the craft that goes into it. ⁹ I mean, c'mon, just look at all the pull requests.