Trends Podcast

In June a founding engineer at a space company posted one sentence about a loading spinner. His name is Andrew McCalip, the company is Varda Space and the sentence was this: the Claude Code spinner might be the most watched line on Earth.

He meant the line a developer stares at while Claude Code, the coding agent from Anthropic, works on a task. It says something like Discombobulating, with three dots after it. The developer sits there reading it until the model finishes.

McCalip had built an extension that sells that waiting time to advertisers. His extension is called Kickbacks. When a developer installs it, the spinner text becomes a sponsored message from a company like Ramp or Linear. The message runs three to sixty characters and it has to stay in front of the developer for ten seconds straight to count as one impression. An advertiser pays McCalip about two dollars for a thousand of them and the developer who did the staring keeps about half.

He runs the company alone. His line at launch: I really want to see how far I can push this as one person with automation.

By the seventh of July a reporter at AdExchanger was profiling him. Twenty-five thousand developers had downloaded the extension and between five and ten thousand of them were running it each day. The average one was earning about twenty-five dollars a month and the top ten percent were earning about seventy-five dollars. By September McCalip's homepage marked its one hundred millionth ad.

One developer measured his payout. He ran Claude Code for twenty minutes with the extension on and counted two hundred ninety-nine ad events. Kickbacks paid him a dollar and thirty-four cents.

Within forty-eight hours of McCalip's launch, two other developers had copied the extension. By July six networks were selling the same sponsored spinner line. Codebacks put its auction on a public leaderboard under the line: your agent is thinking, your status line is earning. On that board a sponsor called Fonda and a sponsor called Libretto were bidding between two and five dollars per thousand plays and one campaign had run to forty-four thousand of them. Idlen priced its slots in euros and promised developers seventy percent. Idle Dev promised sixty-five percent.

Then two of the six stopped. Open Idlepay today and the page reads: this project has been shut down. Open Idle Ads and the host returns a page that says service suspended. Both appeared within weeks of Kickbacks and both were gone by September, before Anthropic had done anything about any of them.

In late July researchers at AdGuard, a company that makes ad blockers, installed Kickbacks and read what it sent home. A pseudonymous identifier, a truncated IP address, the operating system, the editor version and a city-level location, all reported back to McCalip's servers. They priced one developer's data at about seventy-five dollars a year to Kickbacks. Then they read the privacy policy, which says that under California law the program amounts to a sale or sharing of personal data.

A second team read the VS Code build and found it patching Anthropic's bundle, relaxing its Content Security Policy and polling an update server every ninety seconds with no signature check.

Developers read both teardowns and kept installing. Claude's Max plan costs a hundred dollars a month and the top decile of Kickbacks users were earning seventy-five of it back.

Four months before McCalip's post, Anthropic had run a Super Bowl ad. The line on screen read: ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude. Now a one-person company was auctioning a line inside Claude Code by rewriting Anthropic's bundle every ninety seconds.

Anthropic's response so far is a setting. A Claude Code release this summer let a company put its tips on that line beside the built-in ones, so Anthropic now treats the spinner as its surface, with a sanctioned way to change the text. Through September the release notes carry no block on the ad extensions. The Trends dot V C report predicts Anthropic ships one by next March.

The bigger threat to McCalip's business is that the developer stops looking at the spinner. In March Anthropic shipped scheduled cloud tasks, so a developer can hand Claude Code a job, close her laptop and let it run on Anthropic's servers. A productivity study found developers now switch to other work while the agent runs. Some of them couldn't say how long a task took because they'd left the screen. An impression needs ten seconds of her looking. The task takes as long as it did before and she is in another window.

The report predicts the average Kickbacks payout falls below ten dollars a month by the middle of next year. It predicts half the wait-time networks launched by July are shut down or have stopped paying before then.

When I mapped this market for the Trends dot V C report, the number I wanted most was network revenue. McCalip says what he pays out and Codebacks, Idlen and Idle Dev say what they pay out. Each of them keeps its revenue private. The closest thing to a revenue figure for Kickbacks is AdGuard's seventy-five dollars a year per developer. It came from a security researcher rather than from McCalip.

The line McCalip sells belongs to Anthropic. His extension rewrites Anthropic's code every ninety seconds to hold it. One Claude Code release could shut that inventory off. Time magazine sold ads this summer on a surface it didn't control, Perplexity's search index. In late July it started selling sponsored answers written for AI crawlers, with Ally Bank as a first buyer. On the eleventh of August Perplexity blocked those pages from its index and called the ads deceptive, two weeks after the first sale.

If you ship a coding agent or an editor extension, that line is yours and you can sell it without a network. Fonda and Libretto are paying Codebacks two to five dollars a thousand for anonymous developers. A named tool with a known audience can charge more for the same seconds and keep the full price. Start with a sponsor page in your repo and one email to the companies bidding on that leaderboard.

The networks that survive the shrinking wait will sell to the agent that keeps running after the developer leaves. Gravity, an in-chat network that raised thirty million dollars in August, is testing ads that a shopping agent reads and no human sees.

A line you patch into someone else's tool is a line you rent.

This market went from one guy to six networks in ninety days. I publish a new market report each week at trends dot V C.