Room for the Impossible / Track 09
You Still Own What Breaks
A song about accountability: new tools can change how we build, but responsibility for what breaks remains ours.
The words / 09
Lyrics.
The Vibe Coder’s Anthem
Intro, spoken over a building drumbeat
“Hey, AI, build me an app!”
“Done! Ready for production!”
…Are you sure about that?
Verse 1: The Fundamentals
Rate limiting, caching, balancing load,
Reverse proxies guard the road!
API gateways, CI/CD,
Docker, Kuber-ne-tes, service discovery!
Circuit breakers, timeout clocks,
Retries piling up in blocks!
Exponential backoff buys some time,
Idempotency keeps things in line!
Verse 2: Distributed Systems
Message queues and pub/sub streams,
Event-driven fever dreams!
Distributed transactions, saga dance,
Dead-letter queues get a second chance!
Cron jobs ticking, WebSockets glow,
Long polling waiting for data to show!
Server-sent events come pouring through,
What happens when the message comes through twice to you?
Chorus
Prompt it! Build it! Watch the green lights glow!
Who’s got the pager when the red lights show?
AI writes the code, but the judgment’s yours to make,
You can vibe it into being, but you still own what breaks!
Verse 3: Databases
Database indexes, query optimization,
N-plus-one, congratulations!
Connection pooling, read replicas,
Sharding data into pieces!
Partitioning, replication,
Leader election, CAP equations!
Eventual consistency, wait,
The users don’t care whose copy is late!
Verse 4: Concurrency and Scale
Optimistic locks, pessimistic locks,
Distributed locks and ticking clocks!
Race conditions, deadlocks spin,
Memory leaks come creeping in!
Garbage collection, thread safety,
Backpressure when things get crazy!
Autoscaling, horizontal plans,
Vertical scaling, more expensive RAM!
Chorus
Prompt it! Build it! Watch the green lights glow!
Who’s got the pager when the red lights show?
AI writes the code, but the judgment’s yours to make,
You can vibe it into being, but you still own what breaks!
Verse 5: Deployments and Observability
CDNs and edge cache fly,
Cache invalidation, why, oh why?!
Feature flags and blue-green switches,
Canary releases catching glitches!
Rolling deployments, rollbacks fast,
Health checks catching failures at last!
Liveness, readiness, monitoring logs,
Distributed tracing through the fog!
Metrics, alerts, SLI,
S.L.O.s and budgets running dry!
Error budgets, observability,
You can’t fix what you cannot see!
Verse 6: Security
Secrets management, IAM,
OAuth, who are you again?
Juh-whits and token rotation,
TLS securing communication!
Encryption at rest, encryption in flight,
WAF and D.DoS through the night!
CORS, CSRF, S.Q.L. injection,
XSS and SSRF detection!
Database migrations, schema versioning,
Skip the rollback, hear the screaming!
Chorus
Prompt it! Build it! Watch the green lights glow!
Who’s got the pager when the red lights show?
AI writes the code, but the judgment’s yours to make,
You can vibe it into being, but you still own what breaks!
Verse 7: Reliability and Performance
Disaster recovery, backups made,
Failover saves the working day!
Multi-region deployment, chaos engineering,
Cost optimization, bills appearing!
Cold starts, serverless limits bite,
Latency, throughput, sleepless night!
P99 and tail latency,
Network partitions test consistency!
Clock skew, DNS, TCP,
UDP, HTTP/2 and /3!
Everything works? Just wait and see,
The network doesn’t read your README!
Verse 8: Infrastructure and Operations
gRPC and webhooks call,
API versioning affects us all!
Semantic versioning, major, minor, patch,
Infrastructure as code keeps changes matched!
Terraform and Helm charts rise,
Build caching cuts the compile size!
Dependency hell beneath your feet,
Production incidents, no retreat!
On-call ringing, two A.M.,
Postmortems, learn and build again!
Bridge: The Engineer’s Responsibility
The drums drop out. One guitar. The pace slows
The model wrote the feature,
And it passed the happy path.
But nobody asked what happens
When the retries all stack.
It’s not about the typing,
It’s the questions that you ask.
What fails? Who gets hurt?
How do we roll it back?
Let the agents do the heavy lift,
Let the humans set the stakes.
Good engineers don’t write each line,
They understand what breaks!
Final Chorus: Full Band
PROMPT IT! BUILD IT! WATCH THE GREEN LIGHTS GLOW!
WHO’S GOT THE PAGER WHEN THE RED LIGHTS SHOW?
AI WRITES THE CODE, BUT THE JUDGMENT’S YOURS TO MAKE!
YOU CAN VIBE IT INTO BEING, BUT YOU STILL OWN WHAT BREAKS!
Prompt it, test it, know the why,
Know what happens when the servers die!
AI is power, engineering’s the brake,
Build a thousand things, but know what’s at stake!
Outro: Rapid-fire, getting faster
Rate limits! Cache hits!
Deadlocks! Race conditions!
Canaries! Rollbacks!
Distributed transactions!
Terraform! Kuber-ne-tes!
S.L.O.s! Security!
Chaos tests! Recovery!
Observability!
Everything cuts out
Spoken
“Hey, AI? One more thing.”
“Can you explain how this works?”
One final guitar chord
From the writing room
Making the song.
This song started with three screenshots from Natalie Data Engineer’s Instagram checklist on October 15, 2026. Natalie (@nataindata) had followed her reel about what vibe coders need to know with a carousel spelling out all 111 software engineering topics. The first writing prompt used Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as a model for turning that checklist into a rapid-fire list song.
The draft took the subtitle “The Vibe Coder’s Anthem.” Eight verses move through fundamentals, distributed systems, databases, concurrency, deployments, security, reliability and operations. Each verse adds another thing a production app has to survive. The chorus comes back to one question. Who gets the pager when it breaks?
The arrangement directions use contrast to stop that catalogue becoming the whole song. A spoken opening rides a building drumbeat. Later, the drums drop out, one guitar remains and the pace slows for the bridge. That section replaces terminology with the questions underneath it: what fails, who gets hurt and how do we recover? The full-band final chorus turns the responsibility into a shouted refrain, followed by a rapid-fire outro. Everything then cuts out for one last request to the AI: explain how it works. A final guitar chord closes a song about using powerful tools while keeping the judgment that their output still requires.
Natalie Data Engineer’s original Instagram reel (opens in a new tab)
The Instagram checklist that inspired the lyrics (opens in a new tab)
From the original writing prompt, supplied lyrics and arrangement directions.
The complete album