It happened while I was in the middle of an argument with Bradley Thorne. I had come across a bug of his, some anomalous behavior in a window, nothing major, a level-three. “It’s not my bug! Not my bug!” he was shouting. “It says right here it is!” I responded, holding up the printout of the code. “Created by Bradley Thorne,” I read from the header. “Last mod Bradley Thorne.” He squinted at the listing. Mara Margolies was his primary tester, and I had watched her go through this countless times with him: his terrifying forgetfulness, as if he had never before laid eyes upon this code. Thorne was famous for his “code production,” lines of code written by the thousands, a prowess he had apparently achieved by not much bothering to remember what he’d typed. “This code can’t possibly be responsible for that window!” he was shouting. “It says right on the header it is!” I was shouting back. [...]