Recently I was watching one of my AI agents chew through a feature, and in the middle of its chain of thought it dropped: "Bribing the hamster." My first thought was that I was hallucinating instead of the AI model. My reaction was to check my coffee. My second was to find out what was actually going on.
Turns out, it's not a hallucination. It's a feature.
The setting behind it
VS Code's Copilot Chat has a setting called chat.agent.thinking.phrases. Instead of a static "Thinking..." or "Working..." label while the agent is doing its multi-step work in the background, it rotates through a list of playful phrases. Here's what that setting looks like in practice:
"chat.agent.thinking.phrases": {
"mode": "replace",
"phrases": [
"Bribing the hamster",
"Reticulating splines",
"Untangling the spaghetti"
]
}
Remark: "Reticulating splines" is a direct nod to SimCity, where it famously meant nothing at all. Just a fake loading message to keep you entertained while the game did its actual work. GitHub is playing the same joke here.
Why a hamster specifically
The hamster is GitHub's own loading icon. The animal that spins on a wheel while something is running in the background. It's part of a longer lineage of GitHub mascots: the classic "Ship It" squirrel, and now the hard-working loading hamster. Giving it a personality ("bribing" it) is a small wink at the fact that agent mode is still, underneath all the autonomy, something you're waiting on.
Tip: You can override this list yourself. Set chat.agent.thinking.phrases to "mode": "replace" with your own array to swap in your own jokes, or "mode": "append" to add to the existing set instead of replacing it.
The bigger thing hiding behind the joke
The phrase itself is throwaway, but it's a marker of something real: agent mode isn't a single-shot prompt completion anymore. Behind that spinning hamster, Copilot is scanning your workspace, building a multi-file execution plan, running tools, and self-correcting as it goes. The silly loading text exists precisely because that work can take a while, long enough that a static "Thinking..." stopped being good enough UX.
So next time your agent tells you it's bribing a hamster, or reticulating splines, or untangling spaghetti: it's not broken, and neither is your coffee. It's just VS Code keeping you company while the real work happens underneath.