The Probe

The Recovery Log — 007

Saturday 21 February 2026

Probe v0.1 exists. It does not work. Both of those are worth writing down.

The idea was simple enough to be embarrassing in hindsight: encode a source song as a coordinate in the harness, decode from near it, see what comes back. What came back was covers. Every time. Clean, plausible, karaoke-grade covers — the same song, gently restyled, wearing a different coat.

We know now what we did wrong, though we did not know it that night: v0.1 treats the song as an instruction. You hand the model the track and, in effect, ask it to give you the track again, elsewhere. And a model asked for a version of a thing will hand you a version of that thing, forever, competently, into the heat death of the universe.

New entry on the wall list titled THINGS THIS IS NOT. Line one: covers. We suspect the list will get longer before anything else does.