I gave Claude Code my own spinner verbs, and now my terminal sounds like me

Published Aug 29, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT Mahnoor Faisal is a tech journalist covering AI and productivity tools with bylines at XDA, SlashGear, MakeUseOf, Laptop Mag, and Android Police. She's been writing professionally since she was sixteen, and has since penned hundreds of articles. This includes in-depth coverage of AI tools like NotebookLM to breaking news across the AI space. Her passion for technology started when she received her first iPod Touch (4th generation) on her 8th birthday, and she's been deep in the tech world ever since. Currently pursuing a degree in computer science, Mahnoor brings both a journalist's eye and a technical foundation to her coverage of how AI is reshaping the way we work and learn. Baking. Caramelizing. Cascading. Burrowing. Brewing. Concocting. Flibbertigibbeting. Dilly-dallying. Hullaballooing. Photosynthesizing. Razzmatazzing. Sautéing. Shenaniganing. Whatchamacalliting. If you use Claude Code and have spent some time staring at the terminal while it works, you’ve probably seen at least a few of these flash by. They’re what Anthropic calls Spinner Verbs, and they’re little words that appear beside its loading indicator to let you know it’s still thinking, searching, or doing whatever else you’ve asked it to do. And while they’re already far more entertaining than a generic “Loading…” message, I recently discovered you can replace them with your own. Claude Code has 185 spinner verbs by default 185 ways to say “I’m working” If you've been keeping up with the AI world for a few months now, you might recall that Anthropic accidentally shipped a source map file within Claude Code's npm package a few months ago. This essentially allowed the original code to be reconstructed from the minified version, even though it was supposed to remain internal. However, it was accidentally shipped publicly during a routine Claude Code update, and the source map file contained almost 2000 files and around 512,000 lines of TypeScript. As soon as users caught wind of this, thousands of developers downloaded the code and began analyzing it. While there were a lot of much more technical discoveries buried in there (which I wrote about here), one of the more amusing ones was the full list of spinner verbs Claude Code uses while it's working. While many people once thought that the words that appeared while Claude Code was working were generated on the fly and weren't selected from any sort of predefined list, the source code revealed that Anthropic had actually hardcoded 185 of them. You'll find super fun ones like Topsy-turvying, Vibing, Zigzagging, and Shimmying, alongside much more ordinary ones like Thinking, Working, and Searching. When you look at the technical aspect, these verbs are essentially stored as a hardcoded array of strings inside Claude Code itself. A random word is picked from that predefined list and displayed alongside the loading indicator while Claude Code works. You can ask Claude Code to use your own spinner verbs Claude Code can borrow your vocabulary too Something I found out recently is that you can also add your own custom spinner verbs to that list. Claude Code lets you define them in your settings file, which means you can keep Anthropic's defaults and mix in your own, or replace the built-in list entirely with words that feel more like you. I'm personally a fan of the spinner verbs Anthropic has hardcoded, so I went down the route of adding in my own so Claude Code could keep its existing personality while picking up a bit of mine too. The neat part is that you don't actually have to touch Claude Code's bundled code to do this. While Anthropic's default verbs ship as part of Claude Code itself, your custom ones can simply live in ~/.claude/settings.json. When Claude Code starts up, it reads that configuration and, if you use "append" mode, adds your words to the pool of built-in verbs it can choose from. There are two ways to add your own spinner verbs You can do it manually, or make Claude Code do the work Now that you know how the spinner verbs that Claude Code ships with by default work, it's time to actually add your own. There are two ways to go about it. The very first option is that you can open Claude Code's settings file and add the verbs yourself. On my Mac, that file lives at ~/.claude/settings.json, inside the hidden .claude folder in my home directory. Since folders beginning with a dot are hidden by default in Finder, the easiest way to get there is to press Cmd + Shift + G and paste ~/.claude/settings.json. Once you have the file open, all you need to do is add a spinnerVerbs section directly to your settings.json file like this: "spinnerVerbs": { "mode": "append", "verbs": ["YourVerb1", "YourVerb2"] } The append mode is the important bit here if, like me, you want to keep Anthropic's default verbs and simply add your own to the mix. You can add as many words as you want to the verbs array, save the file, and Claude Code will start using them in your next session. If you'd like Claude Code to simply use the ones you added and ignore Anthropic's defaults entirely, you can switch the mode from append to replace. Then, Claude Code will only cycle through the custom verbs in your verbs array. The second, much simpler, way to add your own spinner verbs to Claude Code is to just ask the tool to do it for you. Instead of opening the settings.json file and editing the JSON manually, you can simply tell Claude that you'd like to add your own spinner verbs. Claude Code will then update the settings file on your behalf, and you're good to go. While the spinner verbs I chose to add are words that are part of my daily vocabulary and inside jokes I have with friends, I've also taken a lot of inspiration from the Claude Code community. This Reddit post from u/wynwyn87 in particular came in really handy. The user created a GitHub repository with 888 custom spinner verbs and included categories like Harry Potter, Astronomy, Bee-themed, Cat Behaviour, Disney, DC Comics, etc. So, if you're looking for a way to spruce up your Claude Code experience a little, custom spinner verbs are such a small change, but they're also a surprisingly fun one. They don't change how Claude Code works in any meaningful way, of course, but seeing your own vocabulary pop up while it works makes the terminal feel just a little more personal.