Many coders write “on the page,” as it were, working line by line, function by function, testing bits and slowly building up the program. Cohen back in 2004 wasn’t doing this. He’d wander around all day long lost in his head, pondering the weird timing issues of far-flung BitTorrent peers, modeling it in his mind. Then, after hours of this Romantic idyll, the code would come bursting out—and he’d sit down, composing so perfectly that it appeared to have been dictated. (He compared himself, matter-of-factly, to Mozart in Amadeus.) Jenna confirmed it when she wandered into the kitchen while breastfeeding their three-month-old son. “Bram will just pace around the house all day long, back and forth, in and out of the kitchen. Then he’ll suddenly go to his computer and the code just comes flowing out. And you can see by the lines that it’s clean,” she says. “It’s clean code!”

She pats Cohen affectionately on his head. “My sweet little autistic nerd boy.”