Jun 12, 2026 Jun 12, 2026 2026-06-12

There was a time when attention was free. You gave it away without noticing — to a sunset, to a long conversation, to a book that took days to finish. Nobody was counting.

That time is gone. Attention became the most contested resource on the planet. Entire industries exist for the sole purpose of capturing it, slicing it, reselling it. Your feed, your notifications, your lock screen — all of them are mining operations, and you are the deposit.

We are now at a point where the obvious deposits are exhausted. The news feeds are saturated. The phone notifications are already muted. The big, fat chunks of attention have all been claimed. What’s left — and what the next decade will be about — are the leftovers: what I call “micro-pauses”. The three seconds while an app loads. The half minute while you wait in line. The slivers nobody bothered to claim yet, because until recently they weren’t worth claiming.

A Pause That Didn’t Exist Three Years Ago

And then AI came along and, almost by accident, created a brand new pause.

If you work with LLMs daily, you know it well. The model is “thinking.”, or the agent is running, or Claude Code is compacting its context — summarizing its own memory so it can keep going. You sit there, watching a spinner, in a strange little pocket of time that didn’t exist three years ago. It’s too short to start something else, too long to ignore.

It is, in the purest sense, unharvested attention.

My Pause, My Rules

So I decided to harvest this bit of unharvested attention, on my own terms.

I built a tiny Tetris game that lives in the terminal. It pops up in a fresh window at random intervals, roughly every thirty minutes, and — this is the part I enjoy most — it also fires whenever Claude Code compacts its context, using a simple PreCompact hook. While the machine is busy summarizing its own memory, I play. The pause that used to be a spinner became a micro-break: two or three minutes of pure, simple play, with a soft timer that closes the game and sends me back to work. It’s a few hundred lines of Python, standard library only, built in an afternoon. The whole thing — game, launcher, daemon, hook config — is in the repo here: github.com/dragosroua/compaction-tetris.

That Slot Won’t Stay Empty For Long

Now, a terminal Tetris is just a toy. But the overall pattern is real.

Because once you see the pause, you can’t unsee it. Every wait state in your day is a slot, and a slot will not stay empty. Either you fill it deliberately, or someone else will fill it for you — and they will not fill it with Tetris. They will fill it with whatever extracts the most value from your eyeballs in the shortest time. We already lived through this once with the smartphone: every idle moment became scrollable, and we didn’t choose that. It chose us.

The AI pause is the next idle moment. It’s fresh territory, still unclaimed, and the window to decide who owns it is open right now. That’s the real reason I built the game. Not for the blocks. For the precedent. My pause, my rules.

Drifting Versus Deciding

In my ADD framework, this is the difference between drifting and deciding. The pause is an Assess moment by nature — you’ve stopped doing, you’re just there. The question is whether you move into it with intention or let it dissolve into scrolling by reflex. A deliberate micro-break, even a silly one, keeps you in the loop of your own day. An undeliberate one hands the loop to somebody else’s algorithm.

Where This Can Go

And because the attention slot is generic, the iterations can be literally everything. Instead of a game, the same hook could launch a small bash app that polls your Cloudflare Worker and shows your last purchases — turning the compaction pause into a tiny dopamine dashboard for your indie business. It could run a flashcard that quizzes you on your own codebase, so the dead time compounds into knowledge. It could throw you a single journaling line — “what were you actually trying to do?” — which, mid-session, is a surprisingly sobering question.

Or, in the darkest timeline, it becomes an ASCII-powered ad network: text-mode ads served inside that terminal window, billed by the second, for exactly as long as the compaction lasts. Don’t laugh. Somebody is going to build that. The infrastructure is already there.

Claim It First, Before They Do

Whatever shows up in your terminal micro-breaks depends on a very small decision you can make today: notice the pause, and claim it before it gets claimed.

Every bit of attention counts now. Claim this, before they do.