Nine tracks about being a software engineer in the year my work changed shape.
Software engineer by day. Make records by night. The two halves of that sentence have been arguing for a year.
The argument is an album. It came out today. Nine tracks. It’s called 404: Soul Not Found?
The frame
It’s not about AI taking the work. It’s about work changing shape. John Henry doesn’t lose his job in these songs. He gets asked to become something else. So does the steam drill. So do I. Probably so do you.
The title is a question, not a declaration. That matters.
The nine tracks
Seven move through the experience.
Recognition (John Henry.exe). A man writes code by hand while watching a model trained on him do the same work faster. The hammer keeps swinging. Code has no soul. Still human. Still breathing.
Disorientation (Four Bots Running). Four agents in parallel, doing my work slightly worse and infinitely faster. I built the thing that built the last.
Reckoning (Trained on Me). Not a violation song. A mirror song. If I disappear tomorrow, would you still know what to say. And would it matter if no one could tell the difference anyway.
Wonder (Activation Energy). The album’s central question. Am I thinking differently, or thinking what it needs. Did the ideas get louder, or did it plant the seeds.
Internal war (Luddite Mode). Not anti-machine. Anti-this-deal. We’re the ones who kept our seats. We’re the reason it got faster.
Grief (Automation Blues). Sung in the voice of the displaced. Someone the narrator knew. Someone he warned.
Clarity (Still Human). The album exhaling. You can’t train a soul.
Two more step outside the cycle.
Great Idea (bonus). Every chatbot tells every user every idea is a great idea. Every room says yes now. The room has no face. I’ve been that person. Probably last Tuesday.
Nepenthes (bonus). Built a tarpit module that feeds fake credentials to bot scrapers, slowly, until their compute bill exceeds my pay raise. I used the tools to build the trap. I prompted half the fake myself. Fighting the machine with the machine’s own help.
One song for humans. One song for bots.
Made with AI
Every track was generated with AI. I wrote the concept, the lyrics, the production targets. A model did the singing and the instruments. I’m the songwriter and the director. The model is the band.
If that disqualifies it for you, close the tab. If it doesn’t, this is an album about being trained on, made by the thing that trains on you. There is no clean side of this.
Why the title
In HTTP, 200 means OK. 404 means not found. Brian 200 has been the OK status of this whole project. The 404 is the question the album asks back.
Stack them. Brian 200 / 404: Soul Not Found? The label and the contents disagree, and the disagreement is asked as a question.
That’s the album.
Where to listen
https://brian200.com/404-soul-not-found/
The nine tracks are sequenced. They will autoplay out of order on every platform that exists.
> LISTEN: 404: SOUL NOT FOUND?
Go to the albumOriginally published here. Also syndicated on Medium.