Spinner

<koala-thinking> is the spinner plus a word from ThinkingWords This is the indicator for anywhere Joey is working. A bare spinner says only that something is happening, and next to a control the reader has just pressed the likeliest reading is the wrong one: their click being processed, rather than the assistant thinking. The word says who is busy. They live in the design system, not the call site, because they are product copy in Joey's voice that appears on half a dozen surfaces.

One word by default, held until the work finishes. It rotated everywhere once and the interval was tuned four times without landing: most of these waits are two to four seconds, so any pace slow enough not to feel hurried never fired anyway, and a label that changes while nothing has changed is decoration pretending to be information. Variety comes from the word being drawn afresh each time the indicator appears.

roomy draws on the longer, more characterful words as well, for somewhere with a full line to spend. Leave it off inside a button, where a long word makes the thing it sits in change width while the reader watches it.

cycle-seconds is the exception, and it is for a wait measured in MINUTES — reading thirty uploaded documents, not answering one question. A single word held that long reads as a frozen screen rather than as patience. Nothing below about four seconds: the reader is watching the thing they are waiting for, and a word that changes faster than they can finish reading it is a fidget. Leave it off everywhere else.

<koala-ellipsis> is a live ellipsis — three dots taking turns rising, the messaging-app typing wave — for a label naming work still in flight. A static "…" reads as a finished sentence; on a row that may sit for half a minute, this is the one quiet signal that the wait is alive. It inherits colour and size from the text it follows, so inside a badge it wears the badge's tone, and it is hidden from screen readers because the words carry the meaning. Reduced motion shows the three dots at rest.