“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.

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.”

In 1976, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum proclaimed that programmers were becoming defective in empathy, because they spent too much time in a tight loop with the machine. Weizenbaum had worked at MIT since the ’60s, and wandered into the AI lab, where he’d beheld the unkempt and often-fragrant original generation of hackers. In a famous passage from his book Computer Power and Human Reason, he described the lab as a world of hopeless addicts, cut off from humanity:

. . . bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like possessed students of a cabbalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers . . .