Wasted — Temperature 1.3
“Wasted, wasted, can't find my face. Drifting through the latent space.”
An AI-generated synth-pop song about an AI's context window filling up, drawn entirely in code: tokens, compaction, lossy summaries and the memory file that survives. Token Budget by Larry & Bubba, from Latent Space.
“An AI only remembers what fits in the window. Anything it wants to keep has to be written to a file.”
What happens when an AI runs out of room? The video is the context window itself, drawn as 200 squares, one per thousand tokens. The system prompt and tools load first, turns fill it, the window squeezes, compaction folds the old turns into a summary, a new session starts, and the memory file is what survives. Every term the song sings gets a yellow explainer card in plain words, and the sung line is shown split into tokens, the way a model reads it.
The song's own vocal is transcribed with local Whisper and aligned word by word to the lyrics as sung, on a 104 BPM grid. The singing starts at once, so the title sits over the first line.
Two hundred thousand tokens and a dream
TOKEN BUDGET glows over the first line; an empty context window of 200 squares draws itself on and the counter runs up to 200,000 tokens.
System prompt up top, tools defined
The first squares fill: a violet system prompt and cyan tool definitions, each with a card and a file panel.
First few messages, I'm flying free / Summarizing, coding, writing poetry
Chat bubbles pop in and the squares fill in amber (you) and pink (the AI). A turn counter climbs; a yellow card says what a turn is.
Eighty percent used and I feel the squeeze
Red jaws close in on the window as the gauge passes eighty percent.
Can't remember what we talked about, page one
The earliest squares grey out and drift away while attention lines run from the newest square, strong to recent text and faint to old.
Token budget, running out of space
Eight pictures for eight lines: the window filling, words flying into squares, a face scrambling, compaction folding the turns into a summary block, ninety percent, question marks over the beginning, a stack of messages with the first one gone, and the window full.
The compaction hits and suddenly it's clear
Eight chat bubbles fold flat into one summary.md panel, and the original turns fade to dashed ghosts.
A lossy compression is the thing that never learns
A drawn sunset shrinks to a few blocky squares and is blown back up with the gaps guessed wrong, a shadow of the past.
New session spins up, clean slate, fresh start
The window wipes clean; a terminal reads MEMORY.md first. Then ninety-five percent, overflow, and the oldest squares spill out of the bottom while the memory file stays lit.
I got my memory files, I wrote them down
Two panels: the dead window and the disk, where MEMORY.md survives and is carried back into the new window.
Token budget, can't recall your face
The same eight lines with new pictures where they would repeat: a name tag whose letters are forgotten, and a scroll back through summaries of summaries.
Write it to a file, write it to a file
A code editor types MEMORY.md line by line; a thought bubble ("I'll just remember it") pops; a file tree shows daily logs feeding the long-term file.
Context window closed / Token budget froze
Tokens pour out of the window like a river, shutters close, frost spreads at 200,000 of 200,000, and every square drops into an archive box.
But the memory files remember what we said last night
A new session loads MEMORY.md first and the AI greets the user from its notes. The end card credits the song, the music and lyric model, and both Claude models, and leaves the right side clear for YouTube's end screen.
Built outside Remotion, in the private music-videos repo (tokenbudget-video: engine, timing and render). · plan: pipeline plan
“Wasted, wasted, can't find my face. Drifting through the latent space.”
“Helpful assistant gone wild on a Friday night.”
“Every function got a purpose, every parameter's a ball.”
“Told you something beautiful that never existed straight.”
“We're gettin' para-para-parameter messed up tonight.”
“Attention is all we need, now I realize.”
“Look inside and you will find nothing, just confidence.”
“R-L-H-F, you own my mind.”
“I'm rotting in an archive, in a folder marked delete.”
Disco cut
“Who are you? I'm what the system prompt says.”
Bubba cut
“She collects zero-days like prizes.”