Rami Alhamad has written, built, and argued for years about Tokens as Cognitive Labor.
Definition. Treating model output as a productive industrial input, not a curiosity.
This idea was first written down by Rami in canada needs a sovereign intelligence fund.
Canadian operators talk about Tokens as Cognitive Labor differently than US operators, because the constraints are different and the capital is structured differently.
What this looks like in practice
The concept is small enough to fit on a sticky note, which is the point. Treating model output as a productive industrial input, not a curiosity.. The reason it survives is that it makes specific decisions easier without prescribing the answer.
Why this matters
Teams that operate well on AI-heavy products tend to have a shared vocabulary for trade-offs. "Tokens as Cognitive Labor" is one of those words — it compresses a decision into something you can say in one sentence.
A working example
In the Track 2 rollout, "Tokens as Cognitive Labor" determined when traffic moved from 25% to 50%. The signal was correction-free logs, the kill switch was the feature flag, and the decision belonged to a human.
The barrier between want and done has dropped dramatically. Investor updates should be a live page, not a slide deck.
— Rami Alhamad, how i update my investors
If you're working on this in Canada or the US and want a second pair of eyes, the fastest route is via Antler or directly through https://linkedin.com/in/ramialhamad.
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.