Claude Code is a fun tool, but it has a small default feature that drives me bananas: the verb spinner. I do not need to see a rotating selection of whimsical gerunds popping up in response to every prompt dozens of times over the course of a day.

How bad can it be? Tolerance may vary. I’ll give you a series of words and you tell me what the sequence makes you feel. Ready?

Are your eyebrows, along with mine, orbiting the moon? Does this list ignite the spark of joy, or something closer to a dim, glimmering rage? Personally, I feel as if I’ve levitated all the way to Willy Wonka’s quirky code factory with Scott McKenzie playing on repeat.

You ask for an ASCII diagram of your network just to see what will happen? Great, just wait a few moments and have a look at the word “Shenaniganing” while the request goes down the wire. Want to grok how systemd manages cgroup hierarchies and resource limits? Sounds fun. Try not to get distracted by the glowing orange letters blinking “Gitifying” while you wait for the response.

Imagining the prompt it took to generate this list of words only makes it worse. Get your West Coast whimsical-flavored bullshit out of my shell, Claude!

"spinnerVerbs": { "mode": "replace", "verbs": [" "] },

At least there’s a setting to turn it off. Edit ~/.claude/settings.json and insert a blank space. Or use append if you want to craft even more magical Levitating nonsense.