{"slug": "the-progress-of-progress-bars", "title": "The progress of progress bars", "summary": "Anthropic's Claude AI chatbot displays playful status messages like 'Thinking…' and 'Wibbling…' instead of traditional progress bars, prompting a reflection on the history of progress indicators. The essay notes that progress bars were never truly about measuring progress, but rather about reassuring users that the system is working.", "body_md": "I was waiting for Claude to answer a token-heavy question at work the other day, the little “Thinking…” label flickering into “Wibbling…” and then “Moseying…”, and I caught myself doing the thing I always do when a spinner takes too long, staring at it, trying to divine meaning from the word choice. Is it nearly done? There’s no percentage, no bar, just a word standing in for “trust me, something is happening.” It sent me down a rabbit hole into where progress bars came from, and it turns out they were never really about progress at all.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-progress-of-progress-bars", "canonical_source": "https://blog.omgmog.net/post/progress-of-progress-bars/", "published_at": "2026-07-10 23:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-09 09:54:25.199949+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Anthropic", "Claude"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-progress-of-progress-bars", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-progress-of-progress-bars.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-progress-of-progress-bars.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-progress-of-progress-bars.jsonld"}}