[FEATURE] Separate opt-out for promotional/referral spinner notices — and stop coloring them in the error-red palette

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

Re-filing #45009, which was auto-closed as stale on 2026-06-01 without ever being addressed. It had also been flagged as a duplicate of #43032, #37438, and #16420 — all of which are themselves closed/auto-closed. The request has been bounced between stale- and duplicate-closes and never resolved, so I'm opening a fresh issue with new evidence.

The spinner tips channel mixes two unrelated kinds of content:

1. Tool tips — genuinely useful hints about features, shortcuts, and workflows. Especially valuable for new users.
2. Promotional content — referral offers (e.g. "Share Claude Code and earn $10 in usage credits · /passes"), marketing messages, and similar.

The only opt-out today is spinnerTipsEnabled: false, which kills the useful tips along with the marketing. That's an all-or-nothing choice.

New evidence not in the original issue — still reproducing on Claude Code 2.1.126. The promo tokens $10 and /passes are rendered in the same red that Claude uses for errors and warnings elsewhere in the TUI:

⁂ Hullaballooing… (25m 5s · ↓ 21.0k tokens) └ Tip: Share Claude Code and earn $10 in usage credits · /passes

<img width="669" height="66" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d90bf612-398b-4ce1-b924-bc2530b74425" />

Coloring promo content with the alert palette trains users to tune out red — exactly the color you want preserved for things that actually matter. So this is two problems: a channel-mixing problem (no granular opt-out) and a palette-misuse problem (marketing wearing the error color).

Proposed Solution

Add a separate setting to disable promotional spinner content while keeping educational tips:

{
"spinnerTipsEnabled": true,
"spinnerPromotionsEnabled": false
}

Or a category filter:

{
"spinnerTipCategories": {
"tips": true,
"promotions": false,
"announcements": false
}
}

Independently of the opt-out: stop rendering promotional tokens in the error/warning red. Reserve that palette for alerts.

Priority

Medium

Feature Category

CLI commands and flags

Additional Context

• Bundling marketing with help content erodes trust in all spinner messages.
• New users benefit most from tool tips and are most likely to be annoyed by promo they didn't sign up for.
• Reusing the alert color for marketing actively degrades the TUI's signal.