[Verse 1] Old Fred Taylor had a dream back in nineteen-hundred-nine To take a man and make him tick as neatly as machine Stopwatch in his pocket, put the fellow on a line 'Cause a lathe could not be clever and a lathe could not be keen [Verse 2] Well the joke's on Fred, the table's turned, the century's a wreck We spent a hundred years on making people more machine Now we teach the blessed robot how to reckon and reflect And the manual we hand it isn't C, it's Markdown, clean! [Chorus] You can't amend a norm at paragraph seventeen! A rule will take a patch, but a norm is not like that It's a mind and not machine So burn it down and write the whole thing twice Don't tinker, tune, or preen 'Cause cognitive code gets rewritten, friend Not edited, paragraph seventeen! [Verse 3] Your Python is a railroad and it never leaves the track Start, then stop, then run again, you get the selfsame end But you cannot get a "should" from any if-then-else stack So quit your prompt-engineering, that's a beast you cannot bend [Verse 4] And if the job's a job that JavaScript could do alone Then don't go asking Claude to count your rows by hand, my friend Let it write the little script and let it choose to run its own That discretion is the product, that's the magic in the end [Chorus] You can't amend a norm at paragraph seventeen! A rule will take a patch, but a norm is not like that It's a mind and not machine So burn it down and write the whole thing twice Don't tinker, tune, or preen 'Cause cognitive code gets rewritten, friend Not edited, paragraph seventeen! [Bridge] It likes a bit of repetition Likes a bit of repetition It minds about the order more than you or I would care It'll read a page of verbiage that'd bore a human clean to tears So say it long and say it twice and put the good stuff there [Verse 5] My professor took a red pen to a paper I adored Said "Son, you never wrote it twice, you only sanded down the board" Good writing isn't editing, good writing is rewriting And the same goes for the markdown that you're feeding to the horde [Outro] Rules get amended. Norms get rewritten. Paragraph seventeen!
