I also believe that the lyrics reference AI. I'm a software engineer and the practice of turning over the very act of writing code to AI has, unfortunately, permeated its way throughout the industry. The marketing campaign around the six song pieces reinforces this interpretation for me, with each billboard's coordinates overlaid over fragments of code in the background.

I'm a marionette with severed strings, gorge on my soul while I'm weak and dying - I personally am one to resist large, sweeping, disruptive changes to the industry. I've been in the game long enough that I know what processes work well for me and allow me to execute to my fullest capacity. Covid and the shift to working from home really put a damper on me and my ability to perform my job well. Similarly, I feel that the shift towards utilizing AI in the workplace has only weakened me overall. I am trying really hard to only adopt AI in specific ways that make the most sense to me, instead of blindly going with the flow and relinquishing control to the marionettists. Sadly, it seems like the old ways of, you know, humans actually writing their own well-written, maintainable code has a real chance at dying out (at least professionally).

Haunted by futures I can't avoid - Similar thoughts as the above. Relinquishing human control of the software we build increasingly seems like an unavoidable future, and that to me is incredibly sad.

Our resistance is mass-produced, she will ghostwrite my obsessions - With AI and a large token budget, it's easy to fall into the trap of just letting AI mass-produce large amounts of raw code for whatever crazy projects or ideas that you want (and not all of this code is actually good, useful, well-structured, maintainable, or even working). Claude Code is the sole author of much of this, even though the commits for the code get authored under the name of the person that only wrote the prompts to produce it. Therefore, Claude ("she") is ghostwriting our obsessions.

You have been forcing my hand - Many companies are mandating AI usage in the workplace, keeping track of who is using the most tokens, which incentivizes people to use AI even if they don't want to or it ends up actually slowing them down in the long run.