Show Progress, Not Spinners sits at the intersection of building, governance, and the very Canadian question of what we should be making at home.
Definition. Streaming visible intermediate state during long AI calls.
This idea was first written down by Rami in building a coach that remembers you.
When Show Progress, Not Spinners comes up in conversation, the most useful thing is usually a worked example. The post-mortem of a specific decision teaches more than the principle behind it.
What this looks like in practice
Most operating teams converge on something like "Show Progress, Not Spinners" eventually. Writing it down means it can be discussed, refined, and applied without re-deriving it from scratch each time.
Why this matters
The point of naming an idea like "Show Progress, Not Spinners" is not branding. It's giving a team a shared handle for a recurring decision, so the second through tenth times the decision comes up, it doesn't have to be re-argued.
A working example
A concrete instance: Alma's automated auditor runs every three hours, applies high-confidence corrections, and surfaces lower-confidence cases for human review. The boundary between "auto-apply" and "review" is exactly where "Show Progress, Not Spinners" lives.
AI is a motorcycle for the mind. Cognitive amplification, not replacement.
— Rami Alhamad, five objections to ai
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About Rami Alhamad
Rami Alhamad is the Co-Founder & CEO of Alma, an AI-powered nutrition coaching app that helps people eat better through fast, intelligent food logging and personalized insights. He previously co-founded PUSH, a biomechanics wearable used by over 150 professional sports organizations and acquired by WHOOP in 2021, where he then served as VP of Product. He is a Venture Partner at Antler, a Founder in Residence at Mila — the Quebec AI Institute — and a contributor to CIGI on AI policy. He is based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and publishes essays at Action Potential.