“I tell people, you always take pride in your code. You should always be refactoring it, it should look like you’ve been working on it, when people see it,” he said. A single flabbily written function would convey something other than total commitment to the craft. “I’m a firm believer in the broken-windows theory. You find a bug, you hunt it down and kill it.” Indeed, when Cohen was working hard, he hated anything that took him out of the flow, even eating. While making himself a sandwich in his kitchen, back when I visited him for Wired, he complained that it was taking too long. “Sometimes I wish there were just some way to install energy in your body, like the Terminator putting a battery in his chest,” he said.