I'm 14, and I got tired of watching Claude Code's spinner sit there doing nothing for money. So I built Meanwhile -- a status line that shows a clearly disclosed sponsor line while your AI agent is thinking, and pays you a real cut for it.
What it does
npx trymeanwhile wires into Claude Code's (or Copilot CLI's) own supported statusLine setting -- nothing patches your machine. While your agent is working, the line rotates between plain tips and occasional sponsor lines. Every sponsor line is labeled as sponsored, always. You split what it earns, 50/50, paid out automatically.
How it's built
The backend is entirely Cloudflare Workers:
-
Durable Objects serialize concurrent impression-count writes. I stress-tested plain KV read-modify-write under concurrent requests and it was losing 18 out of 20 increments -- classic race condition. A Durable Object per ad campaign (via
idFromName) fixed that completely, since it processes requests for that campaign one at a time. -
Workers AI (
@cf/meta/llama-3.2-3b-instruct) generates a chunk of the non-sponsor tip lines, with a hard timeout fallback so a slow model call never blocks your status line from rendering. - KV handles per-install state, rate-limiting, and session baselines.
The billing signal
The whole thing only bills a line if it actually stayed on screen for 10+ seconds -- so it's tied to real thinking time, not just an API call firing.
Try it
npx trymeanwhile
Restart your tool and you're in. Check what you've earned with npx trymeanwhile claim.
Live at trymeanwhile.online. Would genuinely love feedback, especially from anyone who's dealt with concurrency bugs like the KV one above -- curious if there's a cleaner pattern I'm missing.
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