There was a bug in my code -
deeply hidden and able to do its dirty work unbidden.
The outputs, seeming to match my yearnings from the start,
and made sense of by my brain so smart,
despite being unknowingly based on numbers shuffled out of line
still formed a picture that, at first sight, looked absolutely fine.
But my logic had been melted by a processor that ran too hot
which meant, in fact, that it was not.

I had to stop and pull the plug,
before devoting every scrap of my energy to hunting for that pesky bug.

There was a bug in my code,
buried so deep to extract a price from me that was far too steep.
I had to break the code apart to follow step-wise, line-by-line
and chip away with care, avoiding damage to the spine
until I caught a fleeting glimpse of an evil face,
though familiar to me, for I was the one who had dropped it into place.
Fighting pain and shame so great they made me numb
I teased it out and burst it open between one finger and my thumb.

There was a bug in my code,
and though it now lies shattered in the dust, I cannot fully trust.
For there is one thing I have gleaned,
that no matter how much I have checked and cleaned
and reassured myself that my code is good
there may still be dangers lurking underneath the hood.
And every time I go to flick the switch,
a tiny unseen flaw could cause a glitch.

I must never let myself feel smug.
There may be other secrets hiding in my code, just like that sneaky bug.

(c) Tim O'Hare, August 2024

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About this poem: In my professional life I am, in part at least, a scientist, and the kind of science work that I do revolves around developing and writing computer models to explore the behaviour of different systems. Usually that work has been related to the movement of sand by waves and currents in coastal environments but over the last few months I have been developing a computer model to explore how and why different strategies that animals deploy in contests for resources have evolved. Several times recently, including last week, I have been excited by the results that my model has generated only to complete further test runs with different initial parameters and unexpected/anomalous results leading me to the realisation that somewhere in my carefully handcrafted lines of computer code there is an error (or bug) that needs to be hunted down and corrected. I had been mulling over the idea for this poem for a few days since the last such occurrence and then this morning, whilst out on a run, I shaped the basic form of the first two verses of this poem, rehearsing them over and over in my head so that they didn’t slip out of my mental grasp. The final form of the poem holds a deliberate ambiguity about the nature of ‘my code’, which could refer both to the computer code of my work and/or the internal ‘code’ that controls my own actions and behaviours.