Andrew McCalip built Kickbacks as a VS Code extension that swaps the Claude Code loading text for a clickable sponsored line during AI processing. Advertisers bid on the slot in real time, and installers who sign in with Google can claim up to half the resulting impressions-plus-clicks revenue, tracked in the status bar and paid out through kickbacks.ai. The change stays fully reversible and never reads prompts or completions.
Get paid to wait
The Claude Code spinner might be the most watched line on Earth.
So I turned it into an ad marketplace.
Advertisers bid on it. You keep 50% of the money.
Install the extension → get cash from ads.
Introducing Kickbacks
The extension targets the spinner overlay in the Claude Code panel and the status line in the terminal CLI, running on standard VS Code, Cursor, Remote-SSH, and devcontainers alike. Incompatible versions simply show a status note instead of failing, keeping the original Claude behavior one click away.
Revenue comes only from the 50/50 split on impressions and clicks, with no subscription or fixed fees for users. The marketplace side, minimum payout thresholds, and current per-click values are not detailed in the launch materials, so actual earnings remain an open variable for now.
Many users praised the ad marketplace extension for Claude's loading spinner as genius or amazing due to the developer's creative grind, while some expressed strong hate or insults toward the project.
wait i didn't think this would have been shown to anyone 😭😭😭
Get paid to wait
The Claude Code spinner might be the most watched line on Earth.
So I turned it into an ad marketplace.
Advertisers bid on it. You keep 50% of the money.
Install the extension → get cash from ads.
Introducing Kickbacks
http://kickbacks.ai/
My latest ultra-high-effort shitposting project. It started as a joke, but then actually turned out to be kind of genius?
In post-scarcity, the only valuable commodity left is human attention, as it’s the salable quantum of the starkest finitude: human life itself.
There isn’t going to be an AGI apocalypse, or mass job loss, or UBI or anything else.
There’ll be ads.
Kind of incredible that the terminal experience for any technological paradigm shift is just optimizing ads lol
Of course Fable did the entire video from end to end. All HTML, absolutely amazing @trq212
It was such an obvious idea in hindsight, I can't believe no one ever did it
An ad in the context window feels wrong, it breaks your trust. But one outside is totally fine. The vibes are 100x better
i'm literally discovering services to use through my own advertisers, this is kind of awesome.
https://box.ascii.dev/
Works in both Claude Code Extension, Claude Code CLI, and Codex
At current rates it easily pays for an entire subscription plan per month. I think it'll be north of $1/agent window/hour
It's just hilariously better than 99% of "ai whatever" startups these days
Get paid to wait
The Claude Code spinner might be the most watched line on Earth.
So I turned it into an ad marketplace.
Advertisers bid on it. You keep 50% of the money.
Install the extension → get cash from ads.
Introducing Kickbacks
People realizing how valuable their eyeballs were
j shaped revenue curves. god i hope i can pay for my Fable costs
The funniest outcome here is that xAI buys all the ad space to be displayed in Claude and Codex 😂
1,000+ visits per min at the site 🤑
@pronounced_kyle
we just crossed 100k adds purchased for the queue
I was inspired by the best! @tbpn
(it works in Codex extension too!)
It would be so funny if this just became the default way the labs introduce ads 😂
The nasdaq of ads. @stripe powering it all.
Per popular request, edit button added to campaigns
This is hilarious, I am seeing all your ads in my own VS code (of course)
