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post-punk

Who Pays

The Rollback 4:45

Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.

Lyrics

chorus

It did what we told it. It did it on time.

The record is gone and the logs all look fine.

Don't ask if it's broken — ask it plainer than that:

ask who's out of pocket, and whether they get it back.

verse

Someone hit cancel. The batch let it go.

Nothing crashed. The lights stayed green.

A year of somebody's counting

went out with no undo, no trace it had been.

Half the room says working as designed.

Half the room says bug, that's clear.

Both of them right. Both of them asking

the wrong thing loudly for a year.

chorus

It did what we told it. It did it on time.

The record is gone and the logs all look fine.

Don't ask if it's broken — ask it plainer than that:

ask who's out of pocket, and whether they get it back.

verse

The spec is a photograph. A best guess, framed

by people who couldn't see ahead.

Call it a bug, it's triaged by morning.

Call it a gap, it sleeps in the backlog instead.

Same loss. Same hole in the day.

Only the door it came through changed.

Small and reversible can wait its turn —

I'm not here to set fire to everything.

bridge

Nobody chose this. Nobody signed.

The design decided on somebody's behalf.

Here's the test, and it's shorter than the argument:

would they need to be told? Would they need to be told?

outro

If they'd need to be told, then you already know.

Working as designed —

that's not a defence, that's a confession.

Fix it. Name it after.

The band

The Rollback

post-punk

Driving bass, angular guitar, dry drums and a deadpan baritone that half-speaks the verses before opening up on the chorus. Wry and faintly exasperated: the narrator has seen this exact failure before and is documenting it rather than complaining.

None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.

Where the words came from

The lyrics were written from the post A Bug Is A Question About Who Pays.

Whether a piece of software behaviour counts as a defect depends less on whether it matches the original specification and more on who absorbs the cost when it does not match what the user needed.

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