Congrats, you're an AI startup now 🎉
Tell your engineer to change "Loading..." to "Thinking..."
Today’s ✨ free marketing idea ✨ is sponsored by Lovart
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The fastest way to become an AI company in 2026
Just rename your “Loading...” to “Thinking...”
I ran a little research and found the actual commit messages on GitHub:
My favorite: “Change Loading to Thinking so I can join the AI bubble” 😅
And this is not a niche joke: Before 2023, a “thinking indicator” shows up in 59 commits across all of public GitHub. Since then: roughly 20,000.
What people do to “look more AI”
✨ ~35,000 commits touch a “sparkle icon” since 2023, 30x everything that came before. One dev swapped his chat icon for sparkles because it “feels more AI.”
🛡️ ~16,000 pin an “AI badge” somewhere on the screen.
🔨 Fake progress is an old trick (5,000+ commits and counting), but 149 now cite the “labor illusion” by name while building it.
🤌🏻 Some fake the wait itself: “Add simulated delay to AI analysis for a more realistic user experience.”
🌀 And ~5,400 add a “thinking animation”, with an open-source library offering 36 ready-made ones.
Even the real thing is theatrical: Claude Code’s leaked source revealed 187 hardcoded “thinking verbs” (words shown when it’s loading):
It works because the psychology is real: a study from January found that chatbots showing no visible “thinking” read as less warm, less engaged, and putting in minimal effort.
So if your product answers instantly or calls it “Loading...” → users read it as the cheap one, even when it does more.
Do this instead 🧠
Yes, people value things more when they see the effort behind them.
But the problem with “Thinking...” is that it’s the laziest possible way to show effort, and there are 20,000 commits on GitHub proving everyone had the same idea. So what’s the real solution?
Show the real thing. If your product scans 2,000 reviews, write “Scanning 2,000 reviews...” on the wait screen. No one can fake YOUR specifics.
Much better!
Staging the delivery is fair game too. My Viral Post Generator‘s loading screen took exactly 10 seconds (actual loading time: 0.5 seconds). The results were real, people just got them slower, and my A/B tests showed they shared more the longer they waited.
I wrote a full playbook on this exact psychology, fake progress bars included.
Just make sure something’s actually working under the hood.
Have a great week ✌️
Tom