Kickbacks.ai is putting ads in Claude Code's loading spinner, and developers get a cut.

It went viral in early June by replacing the "Discombobulating..." spinner with ads, offering devs roughly 50% of the revenue generated during agent wait-states (DEV Community). It's the loudest entry in a new wave of wait-state ad platforms alongside IdleAds and Idlen. I find this a little dystopian and a little inevitable. As agentic coding becomes ambient, the dead seconds inside the loop become ad inventory. The fact that the idle time is now monetizable tells you something about how much of it there is.