i wrote a breakup song for my usage limit

on october 3 i had one sentence: tiroteo, but the one who leaves is not a woman, it's the tokens.

tiroteo (remix) is the 2021 song by marc seguí, rauw alejandro and pol granch. the guy says he dies when she leaves and touches the sky when she's there. i wanted the same heartbreak with the usage limit as the ex. "vuelvo en unas horas", said like someone walking out the door.

the title is the pun. a tiroteo is a shootout. a titubeo is a stammer. in the chorus the shootout turns into a stammer:

se me congela la mente al llegar a cero pensar yo solito es como un titubeo prefiero agotarme yo primero

my mind freezes when i hit zero. thinking on my own is like a stammer. i'd rather burn out first.

the boring reason

parodies of famous songs got between 1,300 and 3,300 views on my side. my originals got between 35 and 255. a melody people already know is a door, and i wanted to see if the door still works. before posting i set the line: 1,000 views in seven days.

the other reason

two posts i had already written were sitting under this joke.

on september 12 my fleet had grown to 144 agents and i wrote that i was just pressing continue. on september 19 the tokens ran out and i wrote about the meter hitting zero: i felt powerless, my thinking felt degraded, and i said the drug was not the tokens, it was unassisted competence.

on october 7, while we were building the lyric, i got that line back as a question. is the drug the ai, or feeling capable? i answered both. then i listed what happened when i tried to do it without tokens. i tried to code it, and it was slow. i tried to write it, slow. i tried to think it, slow. when the tokens end i go for a walk or sleep or do something away from the computer, cause i hate being slow.

that last part became the third hook, and the joke is on me: no es por la salud, es que ir despacio me deprime. it's not for my health, it's that going slow depresses me.

how it got made

six lyric versions in three days. the first one was an agent's parody. then my draft with options, then three possible spines, and i picked this one: i handed my thinking to something that runs out, and when it leaves i find out i'm the one who went slow.

four models reviewed the third version (a fifth never answered). i cut the references only developers would get. i picked the lines for hook 3, the blank page in the rap, the way the song ends. the rest of the candidates came from the models, and the song itself i generated with mureka, so the voice is not mine.

there is a line in the second hook that says tú dile a los demás que yo solito lo hice. tell the others i did it all by myself. i picked that line, and i wrote the song with a council of models.

the video is a puppet animatic built in code, with a usage counter in the corner. it says ia. on the last agotarme it flips to yo. there is also a pop art version, a cover-only version, and an english one where the pun disappears and the chorus becomes "stutter".

what happened

i posted it on october 9, in spanish and english. two reddit posts got one point each and no comments at the first read. the youtube numbers i have not read yet.

the video ends on the screen every heavy user knows, límite de uso alcanzado, and he waits.