acp-thinking-spinner

acp-thinking-spinner is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from humanerd-drew/opencode-drewgent. It costs 82 tokens per session (1,835 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A display pattern for Agent Client Protocol servers, which connect coding agents to apps such as editors and terminal interfaces. It adds a virtual tool card labelled “Thinking...” while the language model is generating a response.

In plain words
What is it for?
Showing that an ACP-based agent is still working during a language-model request, especially in Zed, openCode, JetBrains, or VS Code ACP interfaces.
Why use it?
ACP has no dedicated, consistently animated status for this waiting period. The card gives users a visible working indicator before response streaming begins.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/humanerd-drew/opencode-drewgent/acp-thinking-spinner
Any agent
npx skills add humanerd-drew/opencode-drewgent --skill acp-thinking-spinner
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/humanerd-drew/opencode-drewgent

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for acp-thinking-spinner

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/humanerd-drew/opencode-drewgent/acp-thinking-spinner.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/humanerd-drew/opencode-drewgent/acp-thinking-spinner)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/humanerd-drew/opencode-drewgent/acp-thinking-spinner"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/humanerd-drew/opencode-drewgent/acp-thinking-spinner.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 82 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,835 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00082 $0.01835
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00918
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00367
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00184

Measured 5d ago against content hash 42b5ab96c2b5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

acp-thinking-spinner scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/autonomous-ai-agents/acp-thinking-spinner/SKILL.md · 136 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 136 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ACP Thinking Spinner — Tool-Card Pattern

When an ACP server ({{AGENT_NAME}}'s acp_adapter/, Hermes, or any Agent Client Protocol implementation) needs to show a working indicator during the LLM API call phase, the standard approach is to synthesize a virtual tool call with kind="think". This places a "Thinking..." card in the client's tool-call stack — the same place real tool calls appear, which is the most reliable UI surface.

Why this pattern (root-cause: ACP spec gap)

ACP has no dedicated channel for "agent is generating a response." It only has:

Channel Where it renders Problem
update_agent_thought_text Client's "Thinking" area Most clients render this as static text — JetBrains got stuck on "Thinking" with rawInput updates, others don't blink. Unreliable for "is it stuck?" UX.
update_agent_message_text Answer streaming area Only fires once streaming actually starts; doesn't cover the 0-30s gap before first delta.
ToolCallStart / ToolCallUpdate Tool-call stack (openCode-style) The most reliable UI surface — clients render an animated spinner here for any tool call. Synthesizing a virtual think-kind call works.
Status bar Client-specific Not standardized in ACP — see agentclientprotocol.com/rfds/session-usage (RFD, not yet spec). Cannot trigger from the server.

Conclusion: For a "is it stuck or working?" signal in ACP, the only reliable channel is the tool-call stack. Use a virtual kind="think" card.

State machine

start     → ToolCallStart(kind="think", title="Thinking...")
heartbeat → ToolCallUpdate(status="in_progress", elapsed text)   # at 30s, 60s, ...
complete  → ToolCallUpdate(status="completed")

Hook sites in the LLM call lifecycle:

  1. Before _interruptible_api_call() / _interruptible_streaming_api_call()start
  2. First streamed delta (on_first_delta callback) → complete
  3. Long-running timer (e.g. threading.Timer(30.0, ...)) → heartbeat; cancel on complete

Read the full file on GitHub · 136 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 136 lines · 82 tokens per session scan A 42b5ab96c2b5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

acp-thinking-spinner is a skill published in the GitHub repository humanerd-drew/opencode-drewgent (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 82 tokens to every session and 1,835 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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