The model’s working, printed on a paper tape that feeds behind a smoked window. While it thinks, an amber lamp is lit beside “Thinking” and an LCD counts the seconds.
Seats open in 11 days. Want one email that morning?
Anatomy
The window is a recess whose padding is its frame; the tape is the content box, painted as the kit’s thermal paper with a column of punched holes down its left edge. Steps sit on an engraved rail, each lamp ringed with paper so the rail stops short of it.
Variants
Done · closed, as history
Opened by hand · the tape
Chain of thought · a failed step
Stopped
Hidden by the provider
States
Thinking
Done
Opened by hand
Stopped
Hidden
Focus
Props and options
Name
Kind
Description
label
attribute
The name the head is read by.
state
attribute
Set on history rendered later; start(), end() and stop() set it while streaming.
duration
attribute
How long it thought, for history. end() writes it.
auto-close
attribute
On by default: the window folds away when the thinking ends, unless the reader opened it.
closed · open · still
attribute
closed keeps the window shut while it thinks; open shows history open; still holds a thinking specimen’s clock at its duration.
demo
attribute
Plays about eight seconds of thinking with three steps, for static pages.
paused
attribute
Holds a demo where it is: nothing more is written and the clock stops. Take it off to carry on from there.
start() · write(text) · end() · stop()
method
Stream the working. A blank line in write() starts a paragraph.
Usage notes
It thinks for about eight seconds, stamps three steps, then folds itself away. Open it while it thinks and it stays open. Play it again with the key below.
Accessibility
The tape is not a live region.
Each step’s lamp has a spoken name (running, done, failed), so the colour is never the only signal.
Folding away never takes the tape from a reader who opened it: auto-close only shuts what it opened itself.
Under reduced motion the tape does not feed and the window does not slide; the timer still counts, because the time is information.
An AI chat as a teleprinter, with restraint: what you type sits in a recess; the answer prints on a perforated slip with an amber lamp at the print head; code comes up on display glass. Composer with attachments and a send key that becomes Stop.
An event log like the roll of a chart recorder. The rail is engraved down the plate and each event is a tick stamped across it, with its time in tabular figures and its words beside it. A lamp on the rail is the only colour, and a marker for the present separates what has happened from what is still to come.